



Class. 
Book 



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THE MASTERS OF MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM. 
THE NEW LAOKOON. 

An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts. 
LITERATURE AND THE AMERICAN COLLEGE. 

Essays in Defense of the Humanities. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



THE MASTERS OF 
MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 



THE 

MASTERS OF MODERN 

FRENCH CRITICISM 



BY 



IEVING BABBITT 

H 

Professor of French Literature 
in Harvard University 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

($fce fitoer#t>e pre&j Cambri&oe 

1912 



T 






COPYRIGHT, igi2, BY IRVING BABBITT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published December 1Q12 
,•7 






CI. A 33 030 2 

3t* ./. 



" La critique universelle est le seul caractere 
qyton puisse assigner a la pensee delicate, 
fuyante, insaisissable du XIX e siecle.^ 

Ren an. 



PREFACE 

What I have tried to do in this volume is not to 
criticise criticism, at best a somewhat languid business, 
but to criticise critics, which may be a far more legiti- 
mate task, especially if the critics happen to be, as in 
the present case, among the most vital and significant 
personalities of their time. Matthew Arnold speaks in 
one of his sonnets of "France, famed in all great arts, 
in none supreme." Yet elsewhere he accords to Sainte- 
Beuve a supremacy in the art of criticism of the same 
order as that of Homer in poetry. That Arnold was the 
last man to underestimate a supremacy of this kind we 
may infer from the familiar sentence in his essay on 
translating Homer: "Of the literature of France and 
Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the 
main effort, for now many years, has been a critical 
effort." 

To study Sainte-Beuve and the other leading French 
critics of the nineteenth century is therefore to get very 
close to the intellectual centre of the century. We may 
thus follow the main movement of thought through this 
period and at the same time build up the necessary 
background for the proper understanding of the ideas 
of our own day, whether they continue this earlier 
thought or react from it. 

The so-called anti-intellect ualist movement of the 
present time especially can only be understood with 



viii PREFACE 

reference to such a background; it is a reaction from 
the dogmatic naturalism that reached its height in the 
second half of the nineteenth century, a sign that the 
world is growing weary of scientific positivism and its 
attempt to lock up reality in its formulae. The walls of 
that particular prison house of the spirit are plainly 
crumbling. Parts of the edifice have been collapsing of 
late with almost dramatic suddenness. We must rid our- 
selves of all forms of the metaphysical illusion (including 
the scientific form), says M. Bergson, perhaps the chief 
spokesman of the new tendency, and so make philosophy 
vital. This attempt of philosophy to escape from mere 
intellectualism is in itself highly laudable. With the 
older type of metaphysician ordinary mortals felt that 
they had very little in common. They could at most 
address to him the Virgilian query : — 

" Quid struis ? aut qua spe gelidis in nubibus haeres ? " 

But the philosophers have of late been coming out of 
their chilling clouds of abstraction. They have been 
growing literary, so literary, in fact, that the time would 
seem to have arrived for the men of letters to return 
the compliment and become to the best of their ability 
philosophical. 

The literary critic especially should be willing to meet 
the philosopher halfway, if it be true, as I have tried to 
show in this volume, that they are both confronted at 
present by the same central problem. For, to inquire 
whether the critic can judge, and if so by what stand- 
ards, is only a form of the more general inquiry 



PREFACE ix 

whether the philosopher can discover any unifying 
principle to oppose to mere flux and relativity. We 
are told by the new school that any attempt on the 
part of the intellect to unify life and impose upon it a 
scale of values is artificial, and that we must oppose to 
this artificial unity our vivid intuitions of change, of 
the infinite otherwiseness of things. Now, however little 
we may accept the whole of this thesis, we must grant 
that M. Bergson — and James, as it seems to me, even 
more than M. Bergson — has rendered a substantial 
service to philosophy in thus turning its attention to 
what Plato would have called the problem of the One 
and the Many. Most people, James admits, do not lose 
much sleep over this problem, yet he is right in think- 
ing that all other philosophical problems are insignifi- 
cant in comparison. If philosophy once gets firmly 
planted on this ground, it may recover a reality that it 
has scarcely possessed since the debates of Socrates and 
the sophists. Instead of the intricate fence with blunted 
foils to which the intellectualists have too often re- 
duced it, we may once more see the flash of the naked 
blade. 

In their dealings with the problem of the One and 
the Many, both M. Bergson and James have adopted, 
it would seem sufficiently plain, not the Socratic but 
the sophistical side of the argument. I have expressed 
my own conviction in the following pages that what is 
needed just now is not merely a reaction from scientific 
positivism (that we are getting already), but a reaction 
from naturalism itself. By this I mean that we should 



x PREFACE 

effect our escape from intellectualism not by sinking 
below it, after the fashion of the Bergsonians and prag- 
niatists, but by rising above it, and this would involve 
in turn a use of the Socratic and Platonic method of 
definition. Instead of reducing the intellect to a purely 
utilitarian role, as M. Bergson does, we should employ 
it in multiplying sharp distinctions, and should then 
put these distinctions into the service of the character 
and will. If we are told that in order to get at reality 
we must abandon intellect for intuition, the obvious 
reply is that only by means of the intellect can we lay 
the proper foundations for a philosophy of intuition. 
In short, the word intuition itself is very much in need 
of being treated Somatically. If I have contributed even 
in a small degree to dissipate the dangerous sophistries 
that are accumulating so rapidly around this word in 
contemporary thought, I shall be satisfied. I have tried 
to show, especially in the essays on Joubert and Taine, 
that the term intuition is not simple but complex, that 
there are different orders of intuitions. Good sense itself, 
according to Dr. Johnson, is intuitive, and this is a kind 
of intuitiveness of which we stand in special need at the 
present crisis ; for this word is not too strong to apply to 
a time when the philosophy of the flux is proclaimed so 
confidently and received with so much applause. This 
same naturalistic vertigo, we may remember, seized upon 
ancient Greek society at the very height of its achieve- 
ment and marked the first downward step towards the 
abyss. "Too many of our modern philosophers in their 
search after the nature of things," says Plato in words 



PREFACE xi 

that might have been written yesterday, "are always 
getting dizzy from constantly going round and round; 
and then . . . they think that there is nothing stable 
or permanent, but only flux and motion, and that the 
world is full of every sort of motion and change." 

I have just said that to study the chief French 
critics of the nineteenth century is to get very close 
to the intellectual centre of the age. I am of the belief, 
however little I may have justified it by my practice, 
that this question of the One and the Many, on which 
all the other main aspects of our modern thought finally 
converge, may be studied to special advantage in con- 
nection with these critics. I have aimed, however, to 
estimate the work of each critic in itself and not to 
study it simply as part of an intellectual development. 
To this end I have made a very liberal use of quotation, 
on the principle laid down by Sainte-Beuve : Avec des 
citations bien prises on trouverait dans chaque auteur 
son propre jugement. In such a way one may stand 
aside and let the authors speak for themselves. 

Cambridge, Mass., 
November 1, 1912. 



CONTENTS 

Preface vii 

I. Madame de Stael ...... 1 

II. Joubert 34 

III. Chateaubriand ....... 60 

IV. The Transition to Sainte-Beuve (Cousin — Ville- 

main — Nisard) 79 

V. Sainte-Beuve (before 1848) .... 97 

VI. Sainte-Beuve (after 1848) 129 

VII. Scherer 189 

VIII. Taine 218 

IX. Renan 257 

X. Brunetiere 298 

XI. Conclusion 338 

List of Critics 393 

Index 421 



THE MASTERS OF MODERN 
FRENCH CRITICISM 



MADAME DE STAEL 

The first year of the nineteenth century was appro- 
priately marked by the publication of Madame de StaeTs 
" Literature considered in its Relations to Social Insti- 
tutions." This relationship between literature and society 
upon which the new century was to insist more than any 
previous century had been forced upon its notice by the 
very suddenness of its separation from the past. As 
Stendhal was to say later : " How could you expect a 
man who had been on the retreat from Moscow to care 
for literature written for the men who had taken off 
their hats at Fontenoy to the English column and said, 
'Fire first, gentlemen'?" "Nothing in life should 
be stationary," wrote Madame de Stael in the " Ger- 
many," "and art is petrified when it no longer changes. 
Twenty years of revolution have given the imagina- 
tion other needs than those it felt when the novels of 
Crebillon portrayed the love and society of the time." 1 
Chateaubriand, at variance with Madame de Stael on so 
many other points, agreed with her that men's charac- 

1 De VAUemagne, 2 e Partie, c. xv. 



2 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ters had been profoundly transformed by the Revolution 
and that literature should reflect this transformation. 

We should err, however, in supposing that the pub- 
lic in general at the beginning of the nineteenth cent- 
ury felt the need of changes in art and literature to 
express a changed society. The Empire as a whole was 
a period of artificiality and formalism. This would seem 
less strange if those who had learned nothing and for- 
gotten nothing politically had alone shown zeal in main- 
taining the Old Regime in literature. On the contrary, 
the men who had innovated most rashly in other ways 
were often conspicuous for their literary conservatism. 
Men who had toppled over altars and beheaded a king 
were ready to kneel down superstitiously in the little 
Temple of Taste ; * like Byron who, according to Goethe, 
showed no respect for any law human or divine except 
the law of the three unities. An occasional writer who 
felt a new spirit stirring vaguely within him, and set 
out to be original, only succeeded in becoming odd. 
Thus Nepomucene Lemercier (Nepomucene le Bizarre), 
after precipitating a bloody riot by the liberties he 
took with the unities and verbal decorum in his play 
" Christophe Colomb," afterwards declared in his "Cours 
de litterature," that a tragedy must fulfil precisely 
twenty-six rules 2 or conditions under penalty of ceasing 
to be. 

The society of the Empire, made up as it was largely 

1 Cf. G.Merlet, Tableau de la Litterature francaise, 1800-1815, in, 21. 

2 Cours analytique de litterature generate (1817), I, 179. Comedy must 
observe twenty-two rules, epic twenty-three. 



MADAME DE STAEL 3 

of parvenus and of persons whose education had been 
broken off abruptly by the Revolution, was almost 
naively willing to be schoolmastered. It wished to get 
on the easiest terms that tincture of humane literature 
that was deemed necessary not only to good taste but to 
good breeding. Hence no doubt the popularity during 
the first twenty or thirty years of the century of the 
" Lycee " of La Harpe, the last eminent critical author- 
ity of the Old Regime ; for no one was better fitted than 
he to give a first general initiation into literary tradi- 
tion. Sainte-Beuve calls the critics of the Empire the 
small change of Boileau — Boileau, conceived, of course, 
after the late neo-classical fashion, as the policeman of 
Parnassus, the vigilant guardian of literary orthodoxy. 
Sainte-Beuve points out that they had not only the limit- 
ations but the merits of the older type of critics : they 
were preeminently judicial. They felt themselves sup- 
ported, moreover, in their judgments by a public opinion 
that had grown weary of the chaos and anarchy of the 
Revolution, and are even less important in themselves 
than as the mouthpieces of this opinion. 1 

Geoffroy, the representative critic of the period, was 
fitted by his past to play the pedagogue. He had been 
professor of " eloquence" at Paris before the Revolution 
and taught school in the village where he concealed 
himself during the Terror. Geoffroy, however, cannot 
be dismissed as a mere political and literary reactionary, 
though in a sense he was both. He makes frequent use 
of the historic method and is guided in his actual judg- 

1 See the whole article in Causeries du Lundi, i, 371 ff. 



4 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ments even more by vigorous good-sense than by a re- 
gard for formal requirements. At the age of fifty-eight, 
he created a new genre, the dramatic feuilleton, and 
for twelve years ruled the playwrights and actors of his 
time with a rod of iron. Like Jeffrey, with whom he 
has been compared, he belongs only partly to the old 
critical order by his method, but entirely to it by his 
temper, which was hard, imperious, and vituperative. 
According to an epigram, he died as a result of having 
sucked inadvertently the tip of his own pen. 1 His vio- 
lence, like that of his opponents, is due to the same 
poisonous intrusion of politics into literature that one 
finds at about the same time in England. No wonder 
that a man who has to repel almost daily charges of 
venality and gluttony should in the long run become 
pugilistic. Quite apart from politics, however, Geoffroy 
believed in. the virtues of la critique amere ; and some- 
thing may as a matter of fact be said in behalf of a tonic 
bitterness in criticism. Unfortunately, he not only flour- 
ished the ferule too openly, but had against him the 
deeper currents of his time. He stood at most for a 
minor movement of concentration in an age which was 
in its underlying tendency expansive, and which, caring 
little for discipline, aspired towards a vast widening out 
of knowledge and sympathy. Of this underlying ex- 
pansive tendency the true representative is Madame de 
Stael. 

1 " Nous venons de perdre Geoffroy. 

— II est mort ? — Ce soir, on Pinhume. 

De quel mal ? — Je ne sais — Je le devine, moi ; 

L'imprudent, par megarde, aura suce" sa plume." 



MADAME DE STAEL 



It has been said that the role of Madame de Stael 
was to understand and make others understand, that of 
Chateaubriand to feel and teach others to feel; which 
is only another way of saying that Chateaubriand is 
more intimately related to romanticism than Madame de 
Stael. That " unnatural amount of understanding " in 
Madame de Stael of which Schiller complained sets her 
off sharply from the romanticists and connects her 
with the eighteenth century. Her style is of that age ; 
it lacks, however, the epigrammatic neatness of the 
eighteenth century before Rousseau, and though not 
always free from the sentimentality and declamation 
that the late eighteenth century had caught from Rous- 
seau at his worst, it lacks the imaginative freshness and 
warmth of coloring of Rousseau at his best. It has its 
own merits as a medium for conveying ideas, but it is 
deficient in both the old art and the new poetry. 

Madame de Stael belongs no less decisively to the 
Old Regime in preferring society to nature and solitude. 
Napoleon, in his ten years' duel with her, discovered that 
he could inflict sufficient torment simply by keeping 
her at a distance from Paris., She was especially impa- 
tient with those who suggested that she had a compen- 
sation for her enforced absence from the capital in the 
panorama of the Alps that unfolded itself before her 
at Coppet. She spent years in the presence of this 
panorama, as has been pointed out, without receiving 
from it the suggestion of a single image. However, her 
often quoted remark that she would travel five hundred 



6 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

leagues to meet a man of parts, but would not open her 
window to look at the Bay of Naples, gives a somewhat 
exasperated idea of her indifference to nature. 

no 

In spite of her excess of understanding, her love of 
the drawing-room and her comparative coolness towards 
nature, Madame de Stael is nevertheless a disciple of 
Rousseau. We merely need to define carefully this dis- 
cipleship. She might have said, though in a somewhat 
different sense from Rousseau, that " her heart and her 
head did not seem to belong to the same individual." 
Like Renan she was fond of attributing the conflict of 
which she was conscious in herself to a mixed heredity. 
"To be born a French woman," she says, " with a for- 
eign character, with French taste and habits and the 
ideas and feelings of the North, is a contrast that 
wrecks one's lif e." 1 In the " Germany " Madame de 
Stael says that Rousseau introduced an alien element 
into French literature, an element that is Northern and 
Germanic. Now the element that Madame de Stael con- 
ceived to be common to Rousseau and herself and at 
the same time to distinguish the Germans, manifests it- 
self especially in the power of " enthusiasm." She is, then, 
not only temperamentally an enthusiast, but also an 
enthusiast by the direct influence of Rousseau as well 
as by the Rousseauism that she received from Germany. 

The more we study the literary revolution at the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century, the more it becomes 
plain that everything hinges on the word enthusiasm. 
The romantic movement in its modern phase is even 

1 Letter to Friederike Brun, July 15, 1806. 



MADAME DE STAEL 7 

more a renascence of enthusiasm than a renascence of 
wonder, or rather wonder itself is only one aspect of 
the new enthusiasm. The process by which the word 
enthusiasm itself changed in the course of the eighteenth 
century from a bad to a good meaning, by which the 
enthusiast and original genius supplanted the wit and 
man of the world, is one of the most important in liter- 
ary history and can scarcely be traced too carefully. 

Illuminating passages on the nature of the new en- 
thusiasm and at the same time on Madame de StaeTs 
relationship to Rousseau will be found in her very youth- 
ful " Letters on the Writings and Character of Jean- 
Jacques Rousseau." " Is it not in our youth," she 
exclaims in the preface to that work, "that we owe the 
most gratitude to Rousseau, to the man who succeeded 
in making a passion of virtue, who wished to convince by 
enthusiasm and made use of the good qualities and even 
the faults of youth to render himself its master." Else- 
where she says that " he invented nothing but set 
everything afire " 1 — even to the point it would appear 
of setting virtue afire. Virtue thus becomes an involun- 
tary impulse, a " noble enthusiasm," a " movement which 
passes into the blood and sweeps you along irresistibly 
like the most imperious passions." 2 In other words, for 
Madame de Stael as for Rousseau, virtue is a mere process 
of emotional expansion, related to the region of impulse 
below the reason rather than to the region of insight 
above it. Rousseau and his followers introduce universal 

1 De la Litterature, l e Partie, c. xx. 

2 Discours preliminaire de la Litterature. 



8 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

confusion into morality, as Joubert says, by thus con- 
ceiving of virtue not as a bridle but as a spur. Of Ma- 
dame de Stael in particular, he said that she had a native 
ethical gift which was corrupted by her notion of en- 
thusiasm. " She took the fevers of the soul for its endow- 
ments, intoxication for a power, and our aberrations for 
a progress. The passions became in her eyes a species 
of dignity and glory." 1 

It would not, however, be entirely fair to Madame de 
Stael to see in her conception of morality a mere Rous- 
seauistic intoxication. The two ruling passions of her 
life were hatred of Napoleon and love for her father, 
and as she grew older she showed herself more and more 
not merely the daughter but the disciple of Necker. 
Both her rationalism and her emotionalism were tempered 
by the traditional views of morality and religion of the 
Swiss protestant. In her political thinking again, both 
on her own account and as a follower of her father, she 
departed from Rousseau in putting her chief emphasis 
on liberty. In the very passage where she says that 
Rousseau invented nothing but set everything afire, she 
goes on to say that " the sentiment of equality which pro- 
duces many more storms than the love of liberty, and 
which causes questions to arise of a quite different order, 
— the sentiment of equality in its greatness as well as 
in its pettiness stands out in every line of Rousseau's 
writings." Rousseau was nearer to the French in this 
respect than Madame de Stael. In making the love 
of liberty the mainspring of the Revolution, she was 
1 Pensees, 387 (Edition Paul de Raynal, 1866). 



MADAME DE STAEL 9 

under more illusions about the French character than 
Napoleon, who knew that the deeper craving of the 
French was for equality, even equality under a despot. 
Rousseauistic enthusiasm remains after all the essen- 
tial aspect of Madame de StaeTs genius. She differs 
however from many of the posterity of Jean-Jacques 
in being intellectually as well as emotionally expansive. 
In so far as she desired only expansiveness and refused 
either an inner or an outer check, she was unbalanced 
and did not escape the Nemesis that pursues every form 
of lack of balance, especially, perhaps, lack of emotional 
balance. Yet it may be said in her behalf that the half- 
truths on which she insisted were the half-truths that 
the age needed to hear, and that the excess by which 
she erred was — in spite of the charges of masculinity 
brought against her by her contemporaries ' — the ex- 
cess of the feminine virtues. She really had the large- 
ness and generosity of outlook that her theory required, 
and hers was above all a magnificently hospitable nature. 
The welcome that she extended at Coppet to visitors from 
the ends of Europe symbolizes fitly the breadth of her 
intellectual hospitality. She was cosmopolitan not only 
in the influences she received but in those she radiated. 
As Napoleon complained, she taught people to think to 
whom it would never otherwise have occurred to do so. 

1 Madame de Stael was supposed to have portrayed herself in the char- 
acter of Delphine and at the same time to have satirized Talleyrand in 
the character of Madame de Vernon ; whereupon Talleyrand remarked 
that he understood she had written a novel in which both he and she 
appeared disguised as women. 



10 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ii 

Any one who conceives of life as expansively as did 
Madame de Stael, comes inevitably to be interested less 
in form than in expression. The partisan of form is fas- 
tidious and exclusive, whether his sense of form rests on 
a living intuition or on the acceptance of certain tradi- 
tional standards. Now Madame de Stael almost entirely 
lacked the living intuition of form and had repudiated 
the traditional standards. She was led by her interest in 
expression to exalt the variable element in literature, to 
see it not absolutely but relatively; above all, as we have 
seen, to look on it as the expression of society and there- 
fore as changing with it. Saint-Evremond had opposed 
a keen sense of historical relativity to the overweening 
faith of the age of Louis XIV in the fixity and finality 
of its own standards. But Madame de Stael did not get 
her historical sense from Saint-Evremond, so far as she 
may be said to have had one at all at the time of writing 
her book on Literature; it is rather a development of 
what is already in germ in Rousseau. For Rousseau, 
unhistorical as he was in many respects, treated one 
of the literary forms, the drama, from the relative and 
expressionistic point of view. In the " Letter to D'Alem- 
bert " he maintains that the only possible kind of play 
is the problem play ; furthermore that the dramatist is 
not free to choose his problem, but has it imposed upon 
him by the taste of his country and time. 1 Thus the 

1 " A Londres, un drame inte'resse en f aisant hair les Francais ; a Tunis 
la belle passion serait la piraterie ; a Messine, une vengeance bien savonr- 
euse ; a Goa, l'honneur de bruler les Juifs." 



MADAME DE STAEL 11 

"(Edipus Rex" did not succeed because of its absolute 
human appeal, but because it expressed the taste of an 
Athenian audience of the fifth century B.C. If it were 
put on the stage to-day it would infallibly fall flat. 
Curiously enough Saint-Evremond made precisely the 
same use of the same illustration, and both Saint-Evre- 
mond and Rousseau would seem to have been convicted 
of error by recent successful revivals of the (Edipus as 
an acting play. 

The use of the historical method in the book on " Lit- 
erature " is much obscured by the utterly unhistorical 
conception of perfectibility, that faith in a mechanical 
and rectilinear advance of the human race which so 
many people still hold naively, imagining themselves 
to be evolutionists. Madame de Stael assumes the su- 
periority of Roman over Greek philosophy simply be- 
cause it comes later. She was at least led in this way to 
suspect something of value in those mediseval centuries 
which La Harpe had dismissed as mere " chaos and 
night." 

We find in the u Literature," along with many other 
passages that anticipate at least faintly the " Germany," 
the first form of the celebrated distinction between the 
two literatures, that of the North and that of the South 
(she does not however as yet apply to the former the 
epithet romantic). She shows the limitations both of her 
taste and of her historic sense when, after deriving the 
southern or Graeco-Roman tradition ultimately from 
Homer, she seeks for the headwaters of the northern 
literatures in Ossian ! This love of Ossian was one 



12 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

of the few things she had in common with Napoleon. 
She relates that when Talleyrand presented Bonaparte 
to the Directorate on his return from Italy, he assured 
them that General Bonaparte " detested luxury and dis- 
play, wretched ambitions of ordinary spirits, and that 
he loved the poetry of Ossian, especially because it de- 
taches one from the earth." She adds that the earth 
would not have asked anything better than to have him 
detach himself from it. * 

But let us come to the more mature expression of 
Madame de StaeTs views. Her " Germany " bears the 
marks not only of her travels in Italy, Austria, and 
Germany during the ten years that had elapsed since the 
publication of the " Literature " but also of important 
personal influences. We are told that the proper rule to 
follow in accounting for the ideas of a woman is, Cher- 
chez Vhomme ; and we cannot entirely neglect this rule 
even in the case of Madame de Stael, the most intellec- 
tual of modern women. Heine complained that through- 
out the " Germany " he could hear with disagree- 
able distinctness the falsetto voice of August Wilhelm 
Schlegel. It is not surprising that with such a guide she 
not only gave undue attention to certain German ro- 
mantic writers, but inclined to romanticize Germany in 
general. She was especially indignant at a phrase of the 
letter in which Savary, Duke of Rovigo, announced to 
her the confiscation of the " Germany " and her ban- 
ishment : " Your last work is not French." Yet in a 
sense Savary was right. The Germany that she paints 

1 Considerations sur la Revolution fran^aise, c. xxvi. 



MADAME DE STAEL 13 

becomes (somewhat like the Germania of Tacitus) a 
sort of Arcadia, against which the French corruption 
"sticks more fiery off." The book brought up before 
Heine the image of a " passionate woman eddying about 
like a whirlwind through our tranquil Germany, exclaim- 
ing everywhere delightedly, i how sweet is the peace 
that I breathe here ! ' She had got overheated in France 
and came among us to cool off. The chaste breath of 
our poets was so comforting to her boiling and fiery 
heart. She looked upon our philosophers as so many 
different kinds of ices ; she sipped Kant like a vanilla 
sherbet and Fichte like a pistachio cream. * what a 
charming coolness reigns in your woods ! ' she kept con- 
stantly exclaiming ; ' what a ravishing odor of violets ! 
How peacefully the canary-birds twitter in their little 
German nests ! You are good and virtuous ; you have n't 
as yet any idea of the moral depravity that prevails 
among us in France in the rue du Bac ! ' " 

This legend of an idyllic Germany, a land of senti- 
mental dreamers and philosophers who refused to in- 
terest themselves in anything less than the universe, 1 
survived in France to some extent until the rude awak- 
ening of 1870. To this nation of noble enthusiasts Ma- 
dame de Stael opposes the drily analytical French. It is 
at bottom the same contrast that Coleridge and Carlyle 
elaborated in England. The German is not, like the 
Frenchman, imprisoned in the uninspired understanding 
( Verstand), but dwells in the region of the imaginative 
and synthetic reason ( Vernunft). The psychological ele- 

1 De VAllemagne, l e Partie, c. xvm. 



14 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ments of the opposition thus worked up into a fine 
metaphysical distinction, are already manifest in the 
quarrel between Rousseau the enthusiast, and Voltaire 
the mocking analyst. We are simply witnessing the in- 
ternational triumph of Rousseau over Voltaire. The clos- 
ing pages of the " Germany" in which she exalts enthu- 
siasm as the distinctive German virtue and at the same 
time warns the French against the spirit of cold reason- 
ing and calculation are, as she herself says, the sum- 
ming up of her whole work. 1 They are also, we are told, 
the pages that give the best idea of her actual conversa- 
tion. 2 

Madame de Stael is really arguing against a social 
order the ultimate refinements of which were necessary, 
as we have seen, for her own happiness. In her whole at- 
tack on French society, its artificiality and conventional- 
ism and its abuse of ridicule, in her charge that the spirit 
of imitation had killed spontaneity and enthusiasm, she 
simply repeats, often less tellingly, the arguments of 
Rousseau. "It is unbelievable/ ' says Rousseau of the 
French, " to what a degree everything is stiff, precise 
and calculated in what they call the rules of etiquette. 
. . . Even if this people of imitators were full of origi- 
nals it would be impossible to discover the fact, for no 
man dares to be himself. You must do as other people 
do ; that is the first maxim in the wisdom of the coun- 
try. . . . You might suppose they were so many marion- 
ettes nailed to the same board or pulled by the same 

1 De V Allemagne, 4 e Partie, c. xi. 

3 Sainte-Beuve : Chateaubriand , n, 188. 



MADAME DE STAEL 15 

wire." ! " An aristocratic power," Madame de Stael com- 
plained in turn, "good form and elegance, had triumphed 
over energy, depth, feeling, wit itself. " 2 It had pronounced 
" an ostracism against everything strong and individual. 
These proprieties, slight in appearance and despotic at 
bottom, dispose of the whole of life ; they have by de- 
grees undermined love, enthusiam, religion, everything 
save egotism, that irony cannot touch because it ex- 
poses itself to censure and not to ridicule." 3 A certain 
conception of decorum, a "certain factitious grandeur 
not made for the human heart," as Rousseau had put it, 
always stood in the way of naturalness. " In the pictures 
and bas-reliefs in which Louis XIV is painted," says 
Madame de Stael, " at one time as Jupiter, at another 
as Hercules, he is represented as naked or clothed sim- 
ply in a lion skin, but always with his big wig on his 
head." 4 

This idea of decorum, as Rousseau had already pointed 
out, had been especially fatal to naturalness in the drama 
{la scene moderne ne quitte plus son ennuyeuse (lig- 
nite). "We rarely escape," says Madame de Stael in 
turn, " from a certain conventional nature which gives 
the same coloring to ancient as to modern manners, to 
crime as to virtue, to murder as to gallantry." 5 The 
pathway of escape from this pale conventionality is a 
more thorough study of history. " The natural tendency 
of the age is towards historical tragedy." If she had said 

1 Nouvelle Heloise, 2 e Partie, lettre xvn. 

3 De UAUemagne, l e Partie, c. xi. 8 Tbid., l e Partie, c. ix. 

4 Ibid., 2 e Partie, c. xxxi. * Ibid., 2 e Partie, c. xv. 



16 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

towards historical melodrama, she would very nearly have 
proved herself a prophetess. 

The weapon with which society punishes those who 
depart from its notions of decorum and good taste is 
ridicule. " In France," says Madame de Stael, " the 
memory of social proprieties pursues talent even into its 
most intimate emotions, and the fear of ridicule is the 
sword of Damocles that no festival of the imagination 
can make it forget." * The whole error arises from con- 
founding taste in the literary with taste in the society 
sense. Madame de Stael therefore makes her main at- 
tack on " good taste/' and its tendency to be merely 
negative and restrictive. Taste in the literary sense 
should get beyond petty fault-finding, based on rules 
and formal requirements, and become generous and 
comprehensive and appreciative. Taste in poetry derives 
from nature and like it should be creative. 2 The prin- 
ciples of this taste are therefore entirely different from 
those that depend on social relations. She relates how 
she attended at Vienna the public course of A. W. 
Schlegel and was " dumbfounded at hearing a critic elo- 
quent as an orator, who far from attacking faults — the 
eternal food of jealous mediocrity — merely sought to 
revive creative genius." " Next to genius what is most 
like it is the power to know it and admire it." 3 

This is the message that the chief romantic critics of 
France, England and Germany managed to get uttered 
in some form or other at the beginning of the nine- 

1 De VAllemagne, 2 e Partie, c. ix. 2 Ibid., 2 e Partie, c. xrv. 

8 Ibid., 2e Partie, c. xxxi. 



MADAME DE STAEL 17 

teenth century. "The rules," says Madame de Stael, 
" are only barriers to keep children from falling." These 
barriers are to be set aside and no new restrictive prin- 
ciple is to be imposed on either critic or creator, whose 
roles indeed are very much confounded. Genius is to be 
purely effusive and the critic, instead of serving as a 
check on genius, is only to enter sympathetically and 
comprehensively into its effusions. 

One might suppose that such an expansive view both 
of taste and of genius would not stop short of pure im- 
pressionism. Since there is no norm that can set bounds 
to the creative writer in the unfolding of his originality 
or to the comprehension and sympathy with which the 
critic enters into this originality, taste would seem bound 
to become entirely fluid. Germany is as a matter of fact 
praised as the land where there is no taste in the French 
sense, and where every man is free to follow his own 
impressions. x Criticism, if it does not judge, may at 
least reveal the individual, and in this respect Madame 
de Stael anticipates Sainte-Beuve. " Each character," she 
says, "is almost a new world for any one who knows 
how to observe with finesse, and I am not acquainted in 
the science of the human heart with any general idea 
completely applicable to particular cases." 2 Sainte- 
Beuve for his part had such a predilection for Madame 
de Stael that she has been called the heroine of the 
" Lundis." 

1 De VAllemagne, 2 e Partie, c. i. 2 Ibid., 4 e Partie, c. vi. 



18 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

HI 

Though Madame de Stael is interested in differ- 
ences rather than identities, the differences that interest 
her most after all are not so much those between indi- 
viduals as those between nationalities. To the claims of 
the French and the classicist to possess a monopoly of 
good taste, what she really opposes are the claims of na- 
tional taste. " It is national taste alone/' she says, "that 
can decide about the drama. We must recognize that if 
foreigners conceive of the art of the theatre differently 
from us, it is not through ignorance or barbarism but in 
accordance with deep reflections that are worthy of 
consideration." * Few persons have been more preoccu- 
pied than she with questions of national psychology. 
In Corinne, for example, we have not merely the con- 
flict and interplay of different characters, but of differ- 
ent civilizations; and as usual the French do not show 
to advantage in contrast with other nationalities. Na- 
poleon himself is said to have written the article in the 
" Moniteur " in which Madame de Stael is attacked for 
having made of the amiable but hopelessly superficial 
Comte d'Erfeuil the typical Frenchman. 

Her conception of the relation of nationalities to one 
another simply reproduces on a larger scale the Rous- 
seauistic conception of the proper relation of individ- 
uals. Each nationality is to be spontaneous and original 
and self-assertive, and at the same time infinitely open 
and hospitable to other national originalities. Nation- 
alism in short is to be tempered by cosmopolitanism, and 

1 De VAllemagne, 2e Partie, c. xv. 



MADAME DE STAEL 19 

both are to be but diverse aspects of Rousseauistic en- 
thusiasm. The first law for nationalities as for individ- 
uals is not to imitate but to be themselves. Thus Ma- 
dame de Stael is indifferent to the work of Wieland 
because it seems to her less a native German product 
than a reflection of French taste (V originality nation- 
ale vaut mienx.) l Having, however, made sure of its 
own originality each nation is then to complete itself by 
foreign borrowings. For example, " in order that the 
superior men of France and Germany may attain to the 
highest degree of perfection, the Frenchman must be 
religious and the German somewhat worldly. Piety is 
opposed to the dissipation of spirit which is the fault 
and grace of the French nation ; the knowledge of men 
and society would give the Germans in literature the 
taste and dexterity they lack." 2 " The nations should 
serve as guides to one another. . . . There is something 
very strange in the difference between one people and 
another : the climate, the aspect of nature, language, 
government, finally and above all the events of history, — 
a power even more extraordinary than all others, — con- 
tribute to these diversities, and no man, however supe- 
rior he may be, can guess what is developed naturally in 
the mind of the man who lives on another soil and breathes 
another air. It is well then in every country to welcome 
foreign thoughts, for this kind of hospitality brings for- 
tune to him who exercises it." 3 

Madame de Stael thus appears as the ideal cosmopol- 

1 De VAllemagne, 2 e Partie, c. IV. 2 Ibid., 2 e Partie, c. I. 

8 Ibid. t 2 e Partie, c. xxxi. 



20 MODEKN FRENCH CRITICISM 

itan, as the person who has perhaps done more than 
anyone else to help forward the comparative study of 
literature as we now understand it. But is there not 
something Utopian in the whole conception, is there any 
adequate counterpoise to the inordinate emphasis that 
is placed on the centrifugal elements of originality and 
self-expression ? When individual or national differences 
are pushed beyond a certain point what comes into play 
is not sympathy but antipathy. Madame de Stael admits 
that her cosmopolitanism is only for the few. The ordi- 
nary Frenchman and German, for instance, remind her in 
their relationship to one another of the fable of La 
Fontaine in which the stork cannot eat off the plate or 
the fox out of the long-necked bottle. It is not sure 
that even the few will have sufficient comprehension and 
sympathy to overleap the invisible barriers that are set 
up by individual and national idiosyncrasy. We hear of 
the tact needed by Madame de Stael to keep in check the 
antipathies that were quivering just beneath the sur- 
face in the international elite she had gathered together 
at Coppet. Between Schlegel and Sismondi, for example, 
there existed what Sainte-Beuve calls une haine de race. 
A still better test of the theory is the meeting of 
Madame de Stael with Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, 
perhaps the best instance on record of ideal cosmopolitan 
contact. Crabb Robinson, who was at Weimar at this 
time, insinuated to Madame de Stael that she did not 
understand Goethe's poetry; whereupon her black eyes 
flashed and she replied, "I understand everything that 
deserves to be understood." As for Goethe and Schiller, 



MADAME DE STAEL 21 

the letters they exchanged with one another during her 
visit do not make altogether agreeable reading. Schiller 
denied her any sense for what Germans call poetry, de- 
clared it a sin against the Holy Ghost to speak even 
one word according to her dialect, was overwhelmed 
by her volubility, and felt when she finally left as though 
he were just recovering from a severe illness. Goethe 
complains that she had no idea of duty and wished to 
settle in a five minutes' conversation the kind of ques- 
tions that should only be debated in the depths of a 
man's conscience between himself and God. Both are 
agreed that she took her departure none too soon. Later, 
enlightened by the publication of the " Germany," 
Goethe dilates on the importance of a meeting that 
seemed at the time, he admits, a mere surface play of 
personal and national antipathies : " That work on Ger- 
many which owed its origin to such social conversations 
must be looked on as a mighty implement, whereby in 
the Chinese wall of antiquated prejudices that separated 
us from France, a broad gap was broken ; so that across 
the Rhine and in consequence of this across the Channel, 
our neighbors at last took closer knowledge of us ; and 
now the whole remote West is open to our influences." 1 

IV 

Possibly the most important chapter in the "Ger- 
many " 2 is that in which Madame de Stael takes up again 

1 Annals, 1804. Carlyle has collected the passages from Goethe and 
Schiller that bear on Madame de Stael's visit to Weimar in an appendix 
to the second volume of his critical essays. 

2 2 e Partie, c. xi. 



22 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

her distinction between the literature of the South and 
that of the North and definitely describes the two tra- 
ditions as classic and romantic, thus giving international 
currency to the application that the Schlegels had made 
of these epithets to two distinct literary schools. Classic 
had always passed as the norm of perfection. But Ma- 
dame de Stael refuses to discuss the relative superiority 
of classic and romantic taste. " It is enough to show/' 
she says, turning determinist for the moment, " that 
this diversity of tastes derives not only from accidental 
causes, but also from the primitive sources of imagina- 
tion and thought." 1 She here appears as a disciple of 
Herder and the other German primitivists who had them- 
selves merely elaborated the primitivism of Rousseau 
on a national scale. In true Rousseauistic fashion we 
are to advance by looking backward, we are to progress 
by reverting to origins; only in this way can we escape 
from the artificial and the imitative and recover the 
spontaneous and the original. Our choice is not between 
classic poetry and romantic poetry, "but between the 
imitation of the one and the inspiration of the other." 
"The literature of the ancients is among the moderns 
a transplanted literature, romantic or chivalrous litera- 
ture is indigenous among us and has been produced by 
our religion and our institutions." "Writers who imitate 
the ancients have to conform to strict rules because they 
cannot consult their own nature and memories, all the 
religious and political circumstances that gave rise to 
the ancient masterpieces having changed. " Poems im- 

1 De VAllemagne, 2 e Partie, c. xi. 



MADAME DE STAEL 23 

itative of the antique are rarely popular because they 
are not related at present to anything national.' ' Since 
popularity is to be the test of poetry, we are to look in 
estimating its worth, not merely backward but down- 
ward. "French poetry being the most classic of all 
modern poetries is the only one which is not diffused 
among the people, whereas the stanzas of Tasso are 
sung by the gondoliers of Venice, and the Spanish and 
Portuguese of all classes know by heart the verses of 
Calderon and Camoens, ,, etc. 

The truth in passages of this kind is of course mixed 
up with the usual sophistries of the primitivist. The 
chief Rousseauist venom of the whole point of view is 
found in the elimination of the aristocratic and selective 
element from the standard of taste, and in the assumption 
that the proper judges of poetry are the illiterate. Emer- 
son says that we descend to meet. This is no doubt true 
of certain kinds of meeting, of the kind that takes place at 
an afternoon tea, let us say ; and Emerson probably did not 
mean much more than this. But the phrase may evidently 
have another and, from the humanistic point of view, far 
more sinister meaning. Instead of disciplining himself 
to some form of perfection set above his ordinary self, 
a man sinks down from the intellectual to the instinctive 
level, on the ground that he is thus widening his human 
sympathies. Thus Tolstoy, whose book on art is indeed 
the reduetio ad dbsurdum of Rousseauism, rejects Sopho- 
cles and Shakespeare because of their failure to make an 
immediate emotional appeal to the Russian peasant. 

Moreover Madame de Stael, to judge from her choice 



24 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

of examples, seems to be in some confusion as to the na- 
ture of popular poetry. It is not clear that Tasso is more 
"popular" than Boileau, whom Madame de Stael attacks 
as the extreme type of classic artificiality. Boileau him- 
self says that many of his lines became proverbs at their 
birth. They still remain proverbs, whereas the verses of 
Tasso are no longer sung by the gondoliers of Venice. 
In general to look for poetry at all among gondoliers and 
the like is, under existing conditions, at least, to chase an 
Arcadian dream. For at the very time that one side of 
our civilization is sentimentalizing about the primitive, 
another side of this same civilization is just as surely kill- 
ing it. At the present rate the poetry of the people, poetry 
that is spontaneous in the Rousseauistic sense, will soon 
have given way all over the world to the yellow journal or 
the equivalent. 

The special type of medievalism worked out by the 
German romanticists and diffused by Madame de Stael, 
that is the medievalism that would have the European 
nations break with the classical tradition and return each 
to its own infancy, had its own value as a revolt against 
formalism. But it tended to get rid of form along with 
formalism. Recent research has shown more and more 
clearly that, wherever in the East or West, we find what 
the French call le grand art, art that rises above the 
merely decorative and renders the more essential aspects 
of human nature itself, we are dealing with some survival 
of the great Greek tradition of form. The man who turns 
away from the masterpieces of this tradition to study 
the " Nibelungenlied," or the "Chanson de Roland," or 



MADAME DE STAEL 25 

the Irish Sagas is running the risk, even when he is not 
blinded by national enthusiasm, of impairing his sense 
of form. 

Moreover medievalism is not only likely to involve a 
loss of form, but a loss of ideas. No amount of talk about 
the men of the Middle Ages being of our own blood and 
religion will alter the essential fact that the main move- 
ment of the modern mind has been away from the me- 
diaeval point of view. If we are seeking, not for some 
tower of ivory into which we may retire from the present, 
but for men who had problems similar to our own, we 
shall find these men in certain periods of classical anti- 
quity. The Frenchman of to-day is nearer to Horace in 
his outlook on life than to the author of the " Chanson 
de Roland." An instructor in government recently said 
to me that the most modern book on his subject was 
Aristotle's "Politics." This may prove that we are be- 
coming pagans again, but we are not going to alter the 
fact by romantic dreaming. 

To be sure, the mediaeval primitivists, though they 
have rarely shone as men of ideas, have been in many 
cases not merely romantic dreamers, but also precise in- 
vestigators, and in this way they have related themselves 
to one side of the modern spirit. I once asked a young 
American mediaevalist what his chosen period actually 
meant for him. A rapt expression came into his eyes 
and he replied that for him the Middle Ages were all a 
beautiful dream. To judge, however, by what he actually 
published one would suppose rather that they were an 
unusually dry philological fact. And this is unfair to 



26 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the Middle Ages. For if the romantic medievalist by his 
delvings into the popular and the primitive has cut him- 
self off in large measure from modern thought, he has 
also cut himself off, in at least an equal degree, from the 
thought of the Middle Ages. The works (mainly in Latin) 
in which this thought is to be found are not in the least 
popular or primitive or national, in Madame de StaeTs 
sense, * but derive along manifold lines from Greece and 
Rome and Judaea. 

This literature that expressed the mind of the Middle 
Ages was in the highest degree cosmopolitan, but cos- 
mopolitan in the older and what may turn out to be the 
only genuine sense, — that is, it rested primarily on a 
common discipline and not on a common sympathy. 
Renan, who in his conception of the ideal relations be- 
tween France and Germany, is perhaps the most distin- 
guished of Madame de Stael's French followers, dreams 
of an international fraternity of savants, " an empyrean 
of pure ideas, a heaven in which there is neither Greek 
nor barbarian, neither German nor Latin." Saint Paul in 
the passage that Renan is here paraphrasing says that 
these and like distinctions disappear for those who have 
become " one in Christ." Now Christ, for Saint Paul, is 
evidently the living intuition of a law that is set above 
the ordinary self ; by taking on the yoke of this law men 
are drawn together as to a common centre. Renan's no- 
tion that simply by collaborating in the expansion of 
scientific knowledge men can achieve the union that, 

1 In this sense Renan says that "le sentiment des nationality n'a pas 
cent ans." (Reforme intellectuelle, 194.) 



MADAME DE STAEL 27 

according to Saint Paul, is only to be achieved by spir- 
itual concentration, may turn out to be Utopian ; and it 
is the fate of the utopist to suffer sudden and severe 
disillusions. Renan had his disillusion in 1870. He ex- 
pected the new Christ to come from Germany, as some 
one has put it, and instead he got Bismarck. He was 
pained to see how fiercely German national sentiment 
blazed up in scholars whom he had regarded as being 
before all scientific internationalists, and how mercilessly 
they gloated over the downfall of France. On the other 
hand, many a Frenchman who had been indulging like 
Sully Prudhomme in humanitarian effusions, suddenly 
awoke in 1870 as from a dream and found that his love 
of mankind was as naught compared with his love of 
his own land. * " Let us suppress these unhealthy out- 
bursts of national self-love/' cries Renan. But in the 
name of what principle? In a crisis, the altruistic im- 
pulse either towards other individuals or towards other 
nations is likely to seem to most men pale and unsub- 
stantial compared with the putting forth of personal or 
national power. 

The modern cosmopolitan is to be blamed not for de- 

1 " ' Mon compatriote, c'est l'homme J 
Naguere ainsi je dispersais 
Sur l'univers ce cceur francais : 
J'en suis maintenant dconome. 



Ces tendresses, je les ramene 
Etroitement sur mon pays, 
Sur les hommes que j'ai trahis 
Par l'amour de l'espece humaine," etc. 

(Repentir.') 



28 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

veloping on a magnificent scale the virtues of expansion 
but for setting up these virtues as a substitute for the 
virtues of concentration. He would have us believe that 
every man can fly off on his own tangent, and then in 
some mysterious manner, known only to romantic psy- 
chology, become every other man's brother ; and that the 
same process can be repeated on the national scale. 
There may after all be something in the traditional idea 
that in order to come together men need to take on the 
yoke of a common discipline. But the procedure of the 
Rousseauist is always to get rid of law or discipline on 
the ground that it is artificial or conventional, and to set 
up in its stead some enthusiasm or sympathy. Madame 
de Stael and the romanticists were strong in their at- 
tacks on formalism, but in discarding the idea of law it- 
self along with the conventionalities in which it had got 
embedded they were almost incredibly weak. They are 
at least equally weak in the various sentimental sophis- 
tries and pseudo-mystical devices to which they resorted 
to prove to themselves and others that it is possible to 
have one's cake and eat it too, in other words, to have 
the virtues of centrality while in the very process of fly- 
ing off from the centre. 

As I have already said, there is something of this ro- 
mantic sophistry in Madame de Stael's idea that a true 
cosmopolitanism may rest solely on the rounding out of 
national originality with international comprehension 
and sympathy. To stop at this stage is simply to dodge 
the more difficult half of the problem. It is excellent to 
be internationally comprehensive and sympathetic, but 



MADAME DE STAEL 29 

only as a preparation for being internationally selective. 
Few moments are more perilous for a country than the 
moment when it escapes from its narrow traditional dis- 
cipline and becomes cosmopolitan. Unless some new 
discipline intervenes to temper the expansion, cosmopol- 
itanism may be only another name for moral disintegra- 
tion. Nations no less than individuals, as history tells 
us only too plainly, may descend to meet. Their contact 
with one another may result not in that ideal exchange 
of virtues of which Madame de Stael dreamed, but in an 
exchange of vices. A French traveller relates that on 
penetrating to a remote hill town in India he found on 
the mantel-piece of the only room for the use of Eu- 
ropeans in the local club " a collection of French books 
for exportation, all that frigKiful literature by which 
foreigners judge us." On somewhat the same principle 
the programme of the Moulin Kouge was recently posted 
about the streets of Paris in five languages. One touch 
of lubricity, as some one has put it, makes the whole 
world kin. A man may become cosmopolitan like young 
Grandet in Balzac, who travelled so much and saw so 
many standards of morality in different countries that 
he finally lost all standards himself and became a pro- 
fligate. Madame de Stael was herself well aware of the 
danger of an indefinite widening out of one's horizons. 
"To see everything and understand everything," she 
says, " is a great cause of uncertainty." * Uetendue meme 
des conceptions nuit h la decision du caractere? 
But what is the value of a breadth that has been 

1 De VAllemagne, l e Partie, c. 11. 2 Ibid., 4 e Partie, c. x. 



30 MODERN FKENCH CRITICISM 

gained at the expense of judgment and lacks sufficient 
counterpoise in character? True cosmopolitanism, it 
would appear, like almost everything else that is worth 
having, is a mediation between extremes. We may have 
universal contact as at present, and an international con- 
federacy of scientists, and plenty of persons who, in 
Rousseau's phrase, are ready " to embrace the whole of 
mankind in their benevolence," and yet we may fall 
short of being true cosmopolitans because there is still 
lacking the centripetal force, the allegiance to a common 
standard, that can alone prevail against the powers of 
individual and national self-assertion. " The pathway 
of modern culture," says Grillparzer, " leads from hu- 
manity, through nationality, to bestiality." Long before 
this final stage is reached there may be a sharp reaction 
from the half-truths of the^Rousseauist. 



The unit of Madame de StaeTs thinking, it should be 
observed, is the nation and not the race. The nation as 
she conceives it, though she is not specially clear or con- 
sistent on this point, is not so much a mere product of 
environment as a sort of spiritual entity, a body of men 
united by common memories and achievements and as- 
piring to common ends. The idea of race is evidently 
much more naturalistic, and, as treated by many writers, 
has become almost zoological. No one would of course 
deny the importance of the racial factor, but the at- 
tempts that have been made to formulate it accurately 
have been curiously unsatisfactory. The endless theoriz- 



MADAME DE STAEL 31 

ing that has gone on about race during the past century 
may indeed be seen in the retrospect to have been the 
happy hunting-ground of the pseudo-scientist. And this 
pseudo-science is often used to produce a sort of emo- 
tional intoxication that may take the form either of 
exultation at one's own superiority or else of contempt 
for the (supposedly) inferior breeds. It gives a man a fine 
expansive feeling to think that he is endowed with cer- 
tain virtues simply because he has taken the trouble to 
be born a Celt or a Teuton or an Anglo-Saxon. What 
an exhilaration, for example, Fichte's audience must have 
felt when he told them that there was no special word 
for "character" in German because to be a German 
and to have character were synonymous. The Germans 
were an Urvolk, the elect not of God but of nature; and 
so character instead of having to be painfully acquired 
gushed up from the primordial depths of their being. 1 

Fichte speaks as a primitivist, and there is a clear con- 
nection between primitivism and modern determinism. 
Though Madame de Stael was also a primitivist, and al- 
though she felt the force of the deterministic argument 
as based especially, perhaps, on the influence of climate 
and of the historical "moment," 2 she nevertheless shrunk 
from accepting it. She admits that " no one can change 
the primitive data of his* birth, his country, his age," etc. 3 
Yet she is loath to admit that " circumstances create us 

1 " Charakter haben und deutsch sein ist ohne Zweifel gleichbedeutend, 
und die Sache hat in unsrer Sprache keinen besondern Namen, weil sie 
eben ohne alles unser Wissen und Besinnung aus unserm Sein unmittel- 
bar hervorgehen soil" (Reden an die deutsche Nation, xn). 

2 Cf. p. 19. 8 De VAllemagne, 4 e Partie, c. v. 



32 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

what we are." " If outer objects are the cause of every- 
thing that takes place in our soul, what independent 
thought would emancipate us from their influence ? The 
fatality which descended from heaven filled the soul 
with a sacred terror, whereas that which binds us to the 
earth only degrades us." ! This distinction between the 
psychological effects of the two types of fatality, that 
of Calvin, let us say, and that of Taine, would seem to 
be confirmed by the naturalistic novel and other devel- 
opments in France and elsewhere during the second half 
of the nineteenth century. 

The influence of Madame de Stael at home and abroad 
would require a separate study. Wherever this influence 
made itself felt, as in Italy for example, 2 it stimulated 
national sentiment, on the one hand, and on the other, 
undermined pseudo-classic formalism, especially in the 
drama. The French romanticists had rather a slender 
stock of ideas, but for such ideas as they had they drew 
largely on Madame de Stael. Hugo does not mention 
her in the " Preface de Cromwell," but the relationship 
between the " Germany " and this manifesto of romanti- 
cism can be easily established. 

Madame de StaeTs influence in both France and Italy 
is associated with that of another critic who was in some 
respects her disciple and who acted upon her in turn — 

1 De V Allemagne, 3 e Partie, c. I. 

2 This Italian influence is perhaps, however, overstated by Texte when 
he says of her visit to Italy : " Elle rencontra alors Confalonieri, apotre 
de 1' inde'pendance, et dcrivit dans la Biblioteca italiana un article retentis- 
sant qui suscita le mouvement romantique italien " (Julleville's Hist, de 
la Lit.fr., vn, 709-710). 



MADAME DE STAEL 33 

Claude Fauriel, the friend and admirer of Manzoni. 
Perhaps no one did more than Fauriel for the establish- 
ment of the new scholarship in France at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century. Sainte-Beuve calls him the 
"secret initiator of most of the distinguished spirits 
of this time in literary method and criticism." 1 (I speak 
elsewhere of Fauriel's influence on Sainte-Beuve him- 
self.) Fauriel covered a territory that would nowadays be 
divided among at least a score of specialists — Sanskrit, 
Provencal, early Italian, Basque, Celtic dialects, etc. He 
had a truly Rousseauistic passion for the primitive (we 
are told that among plants he preferred the mosses). 
The unconscious felicities of instinct appealed to him 
more than any form of deliberate art. In this sense we 
may say with Sainte-Beuve that he was the " most anti- 
academic mind by vocation that had ever appeared in 
France.' ' 2 He was in fact a sort of French Herder, less 
enthusiastic and less enamored of general ideas, but 
with more scholarly precision. Yet though he was, as 
Sainte-Beuve estimates, twenty years ahead of his times, 
though he began most of the distinctively modern forms 
of investigation, he did not at any moment break abruptly 
with the past. He marks the gradual transition from the 
point of view of the eighteenth to that of the nineteenth 
century. 3 

1 Portraits contemporains, IV, 127. 2 Ibid., 232. 8 Ibid., 178. 



II 

JOUBERT 

If Madame de Stael is the best type of the Rousseau- 
istic enthusiast at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury we have in Joubert the representative of a very 
different kind of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm that may 
be associated with Plato rather than with Rousseau. 
The sharpness of the contrast between the Platonist and 
the Rousseauist may be inferred from Joubert' s very 
severe judgment on Madame de Stael which I have already 
quoted (p. 8 ). He writes in one of his letters that he 
had " avoided seeing her a thousand times and looked 
on her as a fatal and pernicious being." 1 Yet when she 
died and the news of her death had been received with 
general silence and indifference, in strange contrast to 
the tumult in which she had lived, one of those most 
sincerely moved was Joubert. " The clouding over of 
such a reputation," he writes, " really afflicted me, and 
when I saw that no one was willing to think of this poor 
woman, I began to think of her all by myself and to 
regret with inconsolable bitterness the misuse she had 
made of so much intellect, energy and goodness." 2 

1 Cor., 237. My references are to Paul de Raynal's edition in two 
volumes (4 e £d., 1866). In the volume containing the Pensees, no numbers 
are used in the opening chapter ("L'auteur peint par lui-in erne "). The 
thoughts are arranged by subjects in the following numbered chapters, 
which are therefore called " Titres." 

2 Ibid. 



JOUBERT 35 

So far as the general public was concerned Joubert 
himself lived in entire obscurity, more " enamored/' in 
his own phrase, "of perfection than of glory. " Yet he 
was singularly fortunate both in the friendships he en- 
joyed during his lifetime and the kind of reputation he 
has had since his death. His " Pensees " were presented 
to French readers by Chateaubriand and Sainte-Beuve, 
and to English readers by Matthew Arnold in one of 
the best critical essays ever written in English. 1 The 
literary " Pensees " show such a fine quality of criti- 
cal insight that Joubert has come to be regarded as the 
critics' critic much as Spenser has been called the poets' 
poet. He has that gift of ornate conciseness which 
he himself declared to be the supreme beauty of style. 
It is not, however, his phrase that he polishes, he says, 
but his idea; "I wait until the drop of light that 
I need is formed and falls from my pen." 2 His ambition 
was so to express the exquisite as to give it general cur- 
rency. Now it is not easy to imagine a continuous dis- 
course made up entirely of the exquisite and we are not 
surprised when Joubert says he is unfitted for continu- 
ous discourse. " I lack intermediary ideas." 3 His say- 
ing that sages do not compose reminds one of Emer- 
son's description of the sentences in his own essays as 
infinitely repellent particles. 

The danger for a critic who aims solely at the exquis- 
ite or in his own phrase at " expressing the inexpress- 

1 I am assuming a familiarity with this essay on the part of the reader 
and have as a rule avoided translating the same Pensees. 

2 Pensees, p. 10. 
8 Ibid., p. 8. 



36 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ible " * and who lacks intermediary ideas, is that he may 
become affected and obscure, and Joubert does not alto- 
gether avoid these penalties of oversubtlety. "To 
reach the regions of light," he says, "one must 
pass through the clouds." 2 Unfortunately Joubert 
does not always disengage himself from the clouds. But 
personally, I should not agree with those critics who 
prefer his "Letters" to the "Thoughts" because of 
their greater simplicity and naturalness. The "Let- 
ters," however, do reveal one essential side of Joubert 
far more completely than the " Thoughts." They are 
pervaded by a fine vein of whimsical humor, an habit- 
ual sportiveness, that suggests to Sainte-Beuve a com- 
parison with Charles Lamb. It seemed to Joubert an 
important part of wisdom to distinguish the very few 
things that are to be taken seriously and then to take 
all other things playfully. En tout il me faut quelque 
jeu. 3 He is at the opposite pole from those " serious 
and gloomy spirits who have very futile doctrines"; 
a sentence that inevitably calls to mind many modern 
reformers. 

Possibly the danger of a sort of transcendental pre- 
ciosite in Joubert appears most clearly in some of his 
thoughts on religion. He recognizes the existence of 
matter only by courtesy. If the Creator withdrew his 
breath from the world, he says, it would " become what 
it was before time, a grain of flattened metal, an atom 
in the void, even less than this; a mere nothing." 4 An- 
other sage of whom Joubert frequently reminds one, 

1 Cor., 20. a Tit. I, xc. 8 Cor., 119. 4 Tit. i, xm. 



JOUBERT 37 

does not feel that he can dispose of matter quite so 
lightly. "I can reason down or deny everything/' says 
Emerson, " except this perpetual Belly : feed he must 
and will, and I cannot make him respectable." One is 
tempted to say that in both the literal and figurative 
sense, Joubert lacked body. He himself admitted the 
justness of Madame de Chatenay's remark that he 
seemed a pure spirit who had stumbled on a body by 
chance and made the best he could of it. 

Though we can detect in Joubert something of the 
shrinking of the valetudinarian from the rough and 
tumble of life, we cannot insist too strongly that his 
spirituality is true spirituality and not the Rousseauistic 
imitation. The words that he traced almost with his 
dying hand really sum up the effort of his whole life : 
" 22 March, 1824. The true, the beautiful, the just, the 
holy! " He is far removed from a man like Coleridge 
who retired from his actual obligations into a cloud 
of opium and German metaphysics. The contrast be- 
tween Coleridge's speculations and his daily practice 
recalls Joubert's thought, " Religion is neither a theo- 
logy nor a theosophy ; it is more than all that : a dis- 
cipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement." 1 
Though one of the frailest of invalids, Joubert never 
failed to meet the demands of life. He was justified in 
saying of himself, " Behind the strength of many men 
there is weakness, whereas behind my weakness there is 
strength; the weakness is in the instrument." 2 His 
fellow-citizens in the little town of Montignac where he 

1 Tit. I, lxii. 2 Pensees, p. 8. 



38 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

was born elected him justice of the peace and long pre- 
served, we are told, the memory of his efficiency. 

Sainte-Beuve does not seem to me to strike quite the 
right note of praise when he says that " once to have 
known one of these divine spirits (like Joubert) who 
seem the living definition of the phrase of the poet : 
divinae particulam aurae, is to be forever disgusted 
with all that is not fine, delicate, delectable ; with all 
that is not perfume and pure essence ; it is to prepare 
for oneself assuredly many annoyances and misfor- 
tunes." 1 This passage suggests too strongly that 
Joubert was too good for human nature's daily food, 
whereas he was one of the shrewdest and most practical 
of men. He even pushed too far his horror of the 
merely speculative when he said you can learn more of 
the art of government from a single page of Machia- 
velli's " Prince " than from the whole of Montesquieu's 
"Spirit of Laws." 2 

The danger of Joubert's avowed dislike for mere 
reality, Vaffreuse realite, as he calls it, is not so much 
a romantic retreat into the tower of ivory as an undue 
sympathy for certain conceptions of the noble style and 
the grand manner. He says in defending Corneille that 
we should rise above the trivialities of earth even if we 
have to mount on stilts. 3 His attitude towards the oppo- 
site school of art appears in his remark that the novels 

1 Chateaubriand, n, 138. 

2 As an example of his courage and good sense see his letter to 
Fontaues, then Grand Master of the University, in which he protests 
against the poor pay of teachers and professors {Cor. 217). 

8 Tit. xxiv, v, vn. 



JOUBERT 39 

of Lesage " seem to have been written in a coffee-house 
by a player of dominoes just after leaving the 

theatre." 1 

Joubert's shrinking from Vaffreuse realite is also to 
be connected with the fact that he had lived through 
the Reign of Terror. " The Revolution," he says, 
" drove my spirit from the real world by making it too 
horrible for me." 2 "Revolutions are times when the 
poor man is not sure of his probity, the rich man of his 
fortune and the innocent man of his life." 3 

Joubert as a young man had come into contact with 
Diderot and had got the initiation into the new critical 
spirit that such a contact implies. But even without the 
Revolution Joubert would never have been a thorough- 
going modern. The ancients, he says, were appealed to 
by the magic of the past and not like the moderns by 
the magic of the future, 4 and he was in this respect a 
true ancient. The French are wont, rightly for the most 
part, to call their reactionaries "haters of things new" 
(misoneistes) ; but the epithet that should be applied to 
Joubert is the more gracious Greek, — " lover of things 
old " (<^t\a/)^aios). " The great drawback of the new 
books," he says, "is that they keep us from reading 
the old ones." 5 

What the eighteenth century wanted, according to 
Joubert, was not religious liberty, but irreligious liberty. 6 
It was for discarding as mere prejudice everything that 
did not make itself immediately intelligible either to 

1 Tit. xxxn. 2 Pensees, p. 4. 8 Tit. xvi, lex. 

4 Ibid., xvh, i. 6 Tit. xvni, lvii. 8 Ibid., xvm, xm. 



40 MODEEN FRENCH CRITICISM 

reason or feeling. " My discoveries, and every one has 
his own," he says, "have brought me back to preju- 
dices." x " Our reformers have said to experience : thou 
art a dotard, and to the past : thou art a child." 2 The 
other extreme towards which Joubert himself inclines 
is to impose the past too despotically on the present. 
Though he vivifies tradition with insight, more perhaps 
than any other French reactionary, he is nevertheless 
too resolutely traditional. 3 Such has been the revolu- 
tionary stress of the past hundred years that it has rarely 
failed to disturb the poise even of the most finely temp- 
ered spirits. Joubert tends to see only the benefits of 
order just as Emerson tends to see only the benefits of 
emancipation. 

In the name of what he conceives to be order, he 
would be too ready to deliver society over to the Jesuits 
and fix it in a sort of hieratic immobility. He sees our 
main modern misfortune in what Emerson regards as 
our main modern gain. " Unhappy epochs," he exclaims, 
" when every man weighs everything by his own weight, 
and walks, as the Bible says, by the light of his own 
lamp " ; 4 when the broad communications that formerly 
existed with heaven are broken and every one has to build 
his private ladder. 5 Indeed the more leading-strings the 
better, if it be true, as he asserts, that "few are worthy of 
experience, most allow themselves to be corrupted by it." 6 

1 Pensees, p. 4. 2 Tit. xvm, xx. 

8 " Aux Grecs, et surtout aux Atheniens, le beau litte'raire et civil; aux 
Romains, le beau moral et politique; aux Juifs, le beau religieux et domes- 
tique; aux autres peuples, Pimitation de ces trois-la " (Tit. xvn, xiii). 

4 Tit. xvm, v. * Ibid., xiv. 6 Ibid., xvi, xm. 



JOUBERT 41 

Joubert is of course consistent in his severe hand- 
ling of the two great leaders of eighteenth century 
thought, Voltaire and Rousseau. He can, to be sure, 
imagine good coming from a reformed Rousseau, but 
can conceive of no circumstances in which a Voltaire 
would be of any profit. 1 " Voltaire," he says, " would have 
read patiently thirty or forty folio volumes to find in 
them one little irreligious jest. That was his passion, 
his ambition, his mania." 2 Yet in the final analysis the 
irreligion of Voltaire is a less insidious danger than 
the pseudo-religion of Rousseau. " I speak to tender, 
to ardent, to lofty spirits, to spirits born with one of 
these distinctive characteristics of religion, and I say to 
them : Only J. J. Rousseau can detach you from religion 
and nothing but religion can cure you of J. J. Rous- 
seau. 3 

If Joubert leans too much to the side of reaction in 
his politics and religion he preserves in the main a re- 
markable poise in his literary opinions. He was placed 
between an age that had been rational in a way to dis- 
credit the reason and an age that was going to be im- 
aginative in a way to discredit the imagination. He 
protests against the excess of the past and utters a warn- 
ing against the excess that was to come. Yet nothing 
would give a falser notion of Joubert's work than to 
look on it primarily as a warning or a protest, or upon 
his role as only negative and restrictive. For the French 
he is not merely the author of the " Pensees " but, along 
with Fontanes, the literary mentor of Chateaubriand. 

1 Tit. xxiv, xxxviii. 2 lhid., xxv. 8 Ibid., l. 



42 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Now of these two " guardian angels " of Chateaubriand, 
as Sainte-Beuve calls them, Joubert was the one who 
inspired and encouraged, whereas Fontanes was rather 
inclined to caution and hold back. In his attacks on 
formalism, in his plea for hospitality of mind and feel- 
ing, Joubert had his face turned towards the future. 
Ayons le cceur et V esprit hospitallers — this one phrase 
sums up about all that is legitimate in the new criticism. 
The eighteenth century had wrought harm to poetry, 
partly by imposing a mechanical imitation, partly by the 
abuse of rationalism. Joubert is constantly vindicating 
the claims of the imagination against both the formal- 
ists and the rationalists. "Nothing that does not en- 
rapture is poetry; the lyre is so to speak a winged 
instrument." l No view of life is sound that lacks imag- 
inative wholeness. "Whatever we think, we must think 
with our whole selves, soul and body," 2 and above all 
avoid one-sidedness. " Man is an immense being in some 
sort, who may exist partially but whose existence is de- 
lectable in proportion as it becomes full and complete." 3 
It would not be easy to find an utterance more satisfying 
than this from the point of view of the humanist. Above 
all Joubert is severe upon the one-sided intellectualists 
(and here again his animus against the eighteenth cen- 
tury appears). Philosophers fall into unreality from 
" confounding what is spiritual with what is abstract." 4 
He warns us to distrust words in philosophical books 
that " have not become generally current and are fit 

1 Tit. xxi, ix. 2 Ibid., ix, vol. 

3 Ibid., V, lvh. 4 Ibid., xn, vi. 



JOUBERT 43 

only to form a special dialect." J " How many people 
become abstract in order to appear profound ! Most 
abstract terms are shadows concealing voids." 2 Philo- 
sophy should " have a Muse and not be a mere reasoning 
shop." 3 

Joubert, it should be added, was himself a man of 
wide philosophical reading. He was one of the first 
Frenchmen to make a thorough study of Kant, whom 
he read in the Latin translation — "a German Latin," 
he writes Madame de Beaumont, " as hard as pebbles." 
Getting at Kant's ideas is like cracking ostrich eggs with 
one's head and then most often finding nothing in 
them. 4 " A man," Joubert remarks, " may sprain his mind 
as well as his body," and he seems to have suffered a sort 
of intellectual sprain from reading this Latin translation 
of Kant. His final judgment on Kant is that he was in- 
tellectual where he should have been intuitive and so 
" missed the true measure of all things." 5 

Joubert, according to Chateaubriand, wanted his phi- 
losophy to be at the same time painting and poetry. A 
philosophical thought, as Joubert believed, when it got 
thoroughly matured lost its abstract rawness, as it were, 
and took on atmosphere, form, sound, light, color. Pos- 
sibly his unwillingness to speak abstractly, even when 
abstraction is plainly indicated, is responsible for the 
somewhat over-luxuriant metaphor, the effect of pre- 

1 Tit. xii, xxv. 2 Ibid., xn, xxxn. 8 Ibid., vi. 4 Cor., 62. 

6 He goes on to say that " la mesure de toutes choses est Vimmobile 
pour le mobile, Vinfini pour le limite, le rneme pour le changeant, Veternel 
pour le passager," etc. (Cor., p. 61). For his views of Kant see also Pen- 
sees, Tit. xxiv, xvn-xix. 



44 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ciosite, that I have already noted in some of the 
" Thoughts." He seems very modern in his insistence 
that words should not be treated as mere algebraic signs 
after the fashion of the eighteenth century, that they 
should not be robbed, so to speak, of their aura of sug- 
gestiveness. He felt and encouraged the subtle emotional 
interplay and blending of the different arts that was to 
figure so largely in the romantic movement. " Beautiful 
verses," to quote one of his many utterances on this 
subject, " are exhaled like sounds and perfumes," 1 and 
this should seem good doctrine to a follower of Verlaine. 
" We should not portray objects," to cite another ad- 
vanced saying, " but our feelings about objects"; 2 and 
this should satisfy even a post-impressionist. 

But Joubert was careful to follow his own rule and 
never utter a truth without at the same time putting 
forth its complementary truth. 3 He did not, like so 
many moderns, go mad over the powers of suggestive- 
ness. After speaking of nous qui chantons avec des 
pensees etpeignons avec des paroles,* after saying that 
when " you understand a word perfectly, it becomes, as 
it were, transparent, you see its color and form, you 
feel its weight," etc., he admits that the main thing in 
a word is not its color or its music, but its meaning ; 
and that when words are so chosen and arranged as to 
express the meaning most clearly, they are likely also 
to seem the most harmonious. 5 " What is wanted," he 
says, " is not merely the poetry of images but the poetry 

1 Tit. xxi, xxv. 2 Ibid., xxni, lxxvh. 8 Ibid., xi, xvm. 

4 Ibid., xxii, lxxiv. 6 Ibid., xxh, xxtx. 



JOUBERT 45 

of ideas." * " When the image masks the object, and you 
make of the shadow a body, when expression gives such 
pleasure that you no longer tend to pass beyond, to 
penetrate to the meaning, when the figure in fine ab- 
sorbs the whole of your attention, you are held up on 
the way and the road is taken for the goal, because a 
bad guide is conducting you." 2 This hits severely many 
of the French romanticists, Gautier certainly, and I 
should not hesitate to add, Hugo. 

Unfortunately the French romanticists could scarcely 
have agreed with Joubert about the goal of poetry, for 
their enthusiasm was not like his, Platonic, but Rous- 
seauistic, that is, they sought to escape from abstrac- 
tion, not by rising above the ordinary intellectual level, 
but by sinking beneath it; and so the romantic move- 
ment turned in the main not to the legitimate revival 
of the imagination that Joubert desired, but to the 
glorification of an unchecked spontaneity. Joubert' s 
actual use of the word enthusiasm might be made the 
subject of an interesting study. To what often goes by 
that name he applies some other word — passion, verve, 
entrailles, or the like. True enthusiasm in his sense is 
not associated with heat and movement as in Madame 
de Stael, but with light and serenity, 3 and might best be 
defined, says Sainte-Beuve, as "exalted peace." And so 
Joubert reserves the word for the great poets, the saints 
and the sages. He speaks, for example, of the enthu- 
siasm of Virgil. 

Perhaps the difference between the two types of en- 

1 Tit. xxi, xxm. 2 Ibid.y xxn, ex. 8 Ibid., xxra, evin. 



46 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

thusiasts, the Platonist and the Rousseauist, comes out 
most clearly in the use they would make of imaginative 
illusion. Joubert is nowhere more original than in his 
ideas about the role of illusion in life and art. Here if 
anywhere he justifies his boast that he is more Platonic 
than Plato (Platone platonior). He defends art and 
literature against Plato by arguments that are them- 
selves highly Platonic. The artist should not be satis- 
fied with copying the objects of sense, for in that case 
his works would fall under Plato's censure of being at 
two removes from reality, mere " shadows of a shadow 
world.". He should, on the contrary, so use the objects 
of sense as to adumbrate a higher reality ; so as to pro- 
duce a cast, a hollow cast as it were, of a heavenly arche- 
type. 1 Now this adumbration of a higher reality can 
only be achieved by the medium of imaginative illusion. 
By imaginative illusion communication may be estab- 
lished between the reality of sense and the reality of 
spirit. We may be made to "imagine souls by the means 
of bodies." 2 " Heaven, seeing that there were many 
truths which by our nature we could not know, and which 
it was to our interest, nevertheless, not to be ignorant 
of, took pity on us and granted us the faculty of imag- 
ining them." 3 We can perceive the truth in this sense 

1 Tit. xxi, ii. 

2 Tit. xx, xlv. Joubert distinguishes sharply between V imagination, an 
active and creative faculty, the sole intermediary between intellect and 
spirit, and possessed in a high degree only by the gifted individual; and 
Vimaginative, a sub-rational and passive faculty, that may manifest itself 
Very strongly in children, timid people, etc. See Tit. ni, xlvi-lii. 

8 Cor., 85. 



JOUBERT 47 

only through a veil of illusion, and it is the grace of 
the truth to be thus veiled. 1 This intimate blending of 
illusion and wisdom is the charm of life and of art. 2 
" God deceives us perpetually and wishes us to be de- 
ceived ; and when I say that he deceives us/' Joubert 
adds, " I mean by illusions and not by frauds." 3 Illu- 
sion thus conceived becomes an integral part of reality, 4 
and we must not strive to see anything in its nakedness ; 
— il nefaut rien voir tout nu. 5 

There are evidently two extremes, that of Dean Swift, 
for example, who would tear all the veils from human 
nature and look on it without illusion, and that of Rous- 
seau who would take the illusion and leave the reality 
(at least as Joubert would understand this word). In both 
cases the end was misanthropy. A comparison might in- 
deed be made between Swift and Rousseau so as to il- 
lustrate in a curious way the maxim that extremes meet. 

Joubert has remarks of extraordinary penetration not 
only on the right use of imaginative illusion, but on its 
misuse by the Rousseauists, on what one may call the 
false illusion of decadence. If Rousseau did not relate 
illusion to the reality of spirit, he did relate it in a way 
to the reality of sense; he used it to throw a sort of 
glamour over earthly impulse, especially the master im- 
pulse of sex. 6 In his attitude towards this master impulse, 
Joubert not only departs from Rousseau, but is one of 
the least Gallic of Frenchmen. " By chastity," he says, 

1 Tit. xi, xxxvi. 

2 Tit. ix, v. Cf . Tit. xx, x and Tit. xxm, cxv. 

8 Cor., 125. 4 Tit. xi, xxxix. * Tit. xxi, xxi. 

6 I have treated this topic more fully in The Neiv Laokoon, ch. v. 



48 MODEKN FRENCH CEITICISM 

" the soul breathes a pure air in the most corrupt places, 
by continence it is strong whatever may be the state of 
the body ; it is royal by its empire over the senses ; it is 
fair by its light and peace." 1 Reason may suffice for or- 
dinary virtues, according to Joubert, but religion alone 
can make us chaste. 2 

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre not only exalted passion a la 
Rousseau, says Joubert, but threw a pseudo-idealistic 
glamour over the whole of nature. The result is a sort 
of " ecstatic epicureanism, a gravely Anacreontic moral- 
ity." 3 " There is in the style of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre 
a prism that wearies the eyes ; when you have read him 
a long time you are charmed to see that verdure and 
trees are less highly colored in the country than in his 
writings. His harmonies make us love the dissonances 
that he banished from the world and that you find in it 
at every step. Nature, it is true, has its music ; but luck- 
ily it is rare. If reality offered the melodies that these 
gentlemen find everywhere you would live in an ecstatic 
languor and die in a swoon." 4 

A question of some delicacy presents itself, — how 
did Joubert deal with the Rousseauism of Chateaubri- 
and? "When my friends have only one eye," says Jou- 
bert, " I look at them in profile." 5 But it is plain that 
criticism did not lose its rights even in the case of his 
friends. " Chateaubriand," he says, " has given to the 
passions an innocence they do not have, or that they 
have only once. In 'Atala' the passions are covered 

1 Tit. v, ex. 2 Ibid., cxii. 8 Tit. xxiv, lxvi. 

4 Ibid., lxvh. 6 Petisees, p. 2. 



JOUBERT 49 

with long white veils." 1 The letter that he wrote to 
Mole 2 about the character of Chateaubriand is a master- 
piece of psychological analysis. In this letter Joubert 
anticipates some of the severest judgments of Sainte- 
Beuve, and at the same time contrives to seem not only 
amiable but affectionate. Joubert is not in the least a 
"beautiful soul " in the romantic sense with all the flab- 
biness that the phrase implies. We are asked to accept 
about everything nowadays on the ground that other- 
wise we shall show ourselves narrow and unsympathetic. 
"I love few pictures," Joubert replies, " few operas, few 
statues, few poems, and yet I am a great lover of the 
arts." 

In other words, sympathy must be ideally combined 
with selection, which means in practice that expansion 
must be tempered by concentration, that vital impulse 
must be submitted to vital control. When Joubert was 
told that a great many passions are required in litera- 
ture, " Yes," he replied, " a great many restrained pas- 
sions." 3 I have already quoted his charge that Rousseau 
ruined morality by turning the conscience itself into a 
passion, by making it not a bridle but a spur ; and Jou- 
bert adds that " taste is the literary conscience of the 
soul." 4 Now taste, like most other desirable things, is 
dualistic in its nature, is a mediation between extremes; 
but the selective and restrictive aspect of taste that Jou- 

1 Pensees, p. 393. 

2 Cor., 106 ff. Sainte-Beuve says of this letter that " la psychologic de 
Chateaubriand y est coule'e a fond." {Chateaubriand, ii, 396) ; cf. also 
Nouveaux Lundis, ni, 11. 

8 Tit. xxni, cxxxi. 4 Ibid., xxm, cxlvii. 



50 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

bert emphasizes is not only the most important in itself, 
but it is the aspect which the moderns from Rousseau 
to Signor Croce have most persistently neglected and 
denied. We have seen that Madame de Stael tended to 
identify genius with taste, and to make both purely ex- 
pansive. Joubert inclines rather to the extreme of con- 
centration. "If there is a man/' he writes, "tormented 
by the accursed ambition to put a whole book in a page, 
a whole page in a phrase, and that phrase in a word, it 
is I." 1 " The ancient critics said : Plus offenditnimium 
quam parum. We have almost inverted this maxim by 
bestowing praise on every form of abundance." 2 Jou- 
bert attacks repeatedly another closely related natural- 
istic vice, the worship of mere force or energy, the liter- 
ary Napoleonism of which Sainte-Beuve accused Balzac. 
" Without delicacy," says Joubert, " there is no litera- 
ture." 3 " To write well a man should have a natural 
facility and an acquired difficulty." 4 We are more famil- 
iar perhaps with the exact opposite, with the man who 
had little natural facility, but who has at least succeeded 
in acquiring the sterile abundance of the journalist. 
Joubert has not a trace of our modern megalomania. 
" What is exquisite is better than what is ample. Mer- 
chants revere big books, but readers love little ones," 
etc. 5 Heureux est Vecrivain qui peui /aire un beau 
petit livre* 

Though Joubert was in a high degree judicial and 
selective, the standards by which he judged and selected 

1 Pensees, p. 8. 2 Tit. xvm, Lxxxvni. 3 Ibid., xxni, xxiv. 

4 Ibid., xlv. 6 Ibid., xxni, ccxx. 6 Ibid., ccxxii. 



JOUBERT 51 

were not formal, but intuitive. " Professional critics," 
he says, expressing his disdain for the formalists, " can 
distinguish and appreciate neither uncut diamonds nor 
gold in the bar. They are merchants and know in liter- 
ature only the coins which have currency. Their criti- 
cism has balances and scales but neither crucible nor 
touchstone." x That was the difficulty with La Harpe ; he 
knew the rules, but not the reason which is the rule of the 
rules, and which determines at once their limit and their 
extent. He knew the trade but not the art of criticism. 2 

Though he possessed the critical touchstone of which 
he speaks I am not setting up Joubert himself as infal- 
lible — that would be to accord him privileges too far 
beyond our common humanity. That he could be insuf- 
ficiently on his guard against formalism even in poetry 
where he is usually most at home, is shown by his com- 
parison of Milton with the Abbe Delille, 3 which is not 
only bad but almost monumental in its badness. Per- 
haps his blindness here is an instance of the potency of 
the Zeitgeist which he was one of the first to define 
adequately. 4 

Still his critical intuition puts him on his guard as a 
rule even against the Zeitgeist. Perhaps indeed Joubert 
may be most adequately defined in contradistinction to 
the formalist, as the intuitive critic. But in that case we 
shall need to define with some care the word intuition. 
The intellect is evidently dependent on intuition, as was 

1 Tit. xxin, cxlv. 2 Ibid., xxrv, liv. 

3 Cor., 251. It is only fair to add that Joubert did not read English. 

4 Tit. xvi, l. 



52 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

pointed out long ago by Aristotle, for its knowledge 
both of what is below and what is above itself. We may 
therefore distinguish two main orders of intuitions cor- 
responding closely to the two main types of enthusiasm 
we have already defined : on the one hand, the sensuous 
or aesthetic, and on the other, the spiritual, or as they 
are sometimes termed the intellectual, intuitions. Intui- 
tions of the Many and intuitions of the One, we may 
also call them, making themselves felt respectively, to 
repeat a contrast I have already used, as vital impulse 
and vital control. We may speak, for instance, of the 
intuition of an Emerson ; we may also apply the word to 
the aesthetic sensitiveness, the fine literary perception 
of a Charles Lamb. M. Lemaitre says that Joubert was 
a singuliere et delicieuse creature, but he does not make 
especially clear why Joubert was " singular " and " de- 
licious." The reason, as it seems to me, is that he was 
intuitive in both of the main senses I have defined. Like 
Emerson he possessed " the gift of vision, the eye of the 
spirit, the instinct of penetration, prompt discernment ; 
in fine, natural sagacity in discovering all that is spirit- 
ual.' ' * Hazlitt says that Lamb tried old authors on his 
palate as epicures taste olives. So did Joubert. It would 
be almost needless to multiply examples of his literary 
perceptiveness. 2 

1 Tit. m, xliv. 

2 Chateaubriand has a simular combination of qualities in mind when 
he says more ambitiously that Joubert was a " Platon a cceur de La Fon- 
taine." Joubert was, by the way, the first to point out that " II y a, dans 
La Fontaine, une plenitude de poe'sie qu'on ne trouve nulle part dans les 
autres auteurs francais " (Tit. xxrv, sect, v, xx) — an opinion since adopted 
by Sainte-Beuve, Amiel, and Matthew Arnold. 



JOUBERT 53 

Moreover he never confuses, like so many mere 
aesthetes, the planes of being corresponding to the dif- 
ferent orders of intuitions. Men have always been con- 
scious of the contrast between the rational and the in- 
tuitive sides of human nature, a contrast that pervades 
the literature of the world as that between the head and 
the heart. But the word heart is evidently subject to the 
same ambiguity as the word intuition itself . When Pascal, 
for example, says that the " heart has reasons of which 
the reason knows nothing," he evidently refers to the 
super-sensuous or spiritual intuitions. When La Roche- 
foucauld, on the other hand, says that the " head is al- 
ways the dupe of the heart," he evidently refers to the 
desires and impulses that rise like a cloud about the 
intellect from the sub-rational region of human nature. 
A comparative study might be made between Rous- 
seau and Pascal in such a way as to show that, though 
both writers make everything hinge upon the heart, 
they attach to the word heart entirely different mean- 
ings because they use it to describe different orders of 
intuition. 

These distinctions seem especially needed at present 
when the thinkers who have the attention of the world, 
thinkers like James and M. Bergson and Signor Croce, 
are all agreed at least in appealing from intellect to in- 
tuition. If Joubert has so little in common with these 
thinkers, it is plainly because they are intuitive only in 
the Rousseauistic sense, and not like him in the Platonic 
sense as well. James and M. Bergson do not, like Jou- 
bert, look on the One as a living intuition, but as an in- 



54 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ert intellectual concept ; and they would have us believe 
that we can escape from this intellectualism only by div- 
ing into the flux, — in other words by cultivating our 
intuitions of the Many. It is to be feared that Joubert 
would have said of this modern philosophy what he said 
of the philosophy of change in the form it had assumed 
in his own time : " I detest these horrible maxims as the 
ancient sages would have done." l He looked with sus- 
picion on philosophies which, so far from throwing light 
on previous philosophies, simply contradict them ; 2 and 
from this point of view, he would have looked with spe- 
cial suspicion on M. Bergson. For if M. Bergson's con- 
ception of reality be correct, most of the great philoso- 
phers of the past, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, 
have had, not merely a mistaken, but an absolutely in- 
verted view of reality. 

To say that Joubert is spiritually intuitive is to put 
him in the class of sages; a class, the representatives of 
which are recognizable through the infinitely diverse 
accidents of time and space by their agreement on essen- 
tials. It would, for example, be easy to collect a list of 
parallel passages from Joubert and Emerson. "When 
there is born in a nation," says Joubert, " an individual 
capable of producing a great thought, another one is 
born capable of understanding it and admiring it." Here 
is Emerson's favorite doctrine that "the hearing ear is 
always found close to the speaking tongue." The follow- 
ing thought, the equivalent of which might also be found 
in Emerson, we should be justified in calling Buddhistic, 

1 Cor., 257. 2 Tit. xn, liv. 



JOUBERT 55 

especially if we remember that the very name Buddha 
means the Awakened: "How many people eat, drink 
and get married; buy, sell and build; make contracts 
and attend to their fortune ; have friends and enemies, 
pleasures and pains ; are born, grow up, live and die, — 
but asleep ! " x Men tend to come together in proportion 
to their intuitions of the One ; in other words the true 
unifying principle of mankind is found in the insight of 
its sages. We ascend to meet. 

Possibly the contrast between the intuitiveness of 
Joubert and the sages and that of M. Bergson may be 
brought out most clearly by comparing their attitude 
towards time. Reality is a pure process of flux and change 
according to M. Bergson, and this change takes place in 
time ; so that " time is the very stuff of which our lives 
are made." 2 We should strive to see things not sub 
specie aeternitatis, but sub specie durationis. Under 
how many forms, under what diverse conditions of time 
and space, would it be possible to find the opposite asser- 
tion ! "The sage is delivered from time," 3 says Buddha. 
" Happy is the soul in which time no longer courses ! " 
says Michael Angelo. " Time," says Joubert, "measured 
here below by the succession of beings which are con- 
stantly changing and being renewed, is seen and felt, 
and reckoned and exists. Higher up there is no change 
or succession, or new or old, or yesterday or to-morrow." 4 
(Elsewhere Joubert adds that there is time even in eter- 
nity, though not a terrestrial and earthly time which is 

1 Tit. vn, Lxm. 2 VEvolution creatrice. 

8 " Akappiyo." See Sutta-Nipdta t rv, 10. 4 Tit. xm, rv. 



56 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

counted by the movement and succession of bodies. 1 ) 
Emerson affirms in somewhat similar fashion of "the 
core of God's abysm " : — 

" There Past, Present, Future shoot 
Triple blossoms from one root." 

And so we might lengthen indefinitely the list of those 
who have found their supreme reality, not like M. Berg- 
son in time, but in transcending time. 

If a man becomes a sage only by being spiritually in- 
tuitive, it is highly desirable, and indeed necessary, if he 
is to be a critic or creator of art and literature, that he 
should also be intuitive in the sense M. Bergson recom- 
mends. Perhaps, indeed, the wisest man is he who has both 
orders of intuitions and then mediates between them ; 
who joins to his sense of unity a fine perception of the 
local, the individual, the transitory. Joubert's quality as 
a critic is revealed especially by the fact that he not 
only had standards but held them fluidly. His insistence 
on the fixed and the permanent is nearly always tem- 
pered by the sense of change and instability. "A man 
must provide himself," he says, in his highly metaphor- 
ical fashion, "with anchors and ballast, that is, with fixed 
and constant opinions, and then he should allow the ban- 
ners to float free and the sails to swell ; the mast alone 
should remain unshaken." 2 Again: "Truth in one's 
style is an indispensable virtue and sufficient to recom- 
mend a writer. If on every manner of subject we wished 
to write nowadays as people wrote in the time of 

1 Tit. vi. a Tit. ix, xlh. 



JOUBERT 57 

Louis XIV we should have no truth in our style, for we 
no longer have the same humors, the same opinions, the 
same manners. . . . The more the genre in which you 
write is related to your character, to the manners of the 
age, the more your style should depart from that of 
writers who have been models only because they excelled 
in expressing in their works either the manners of their 
epoch or their own character. Good taste itself in this 
case allows you to depart from the best taste, for taste 
changes with manners, even good taste." Yet Joubert 
adds (and here, perhaps, the reactionary note appears), 
that there are genres that do not change. "I think that 
the sacred orator would always do well to write and think 
as Bossuet would have thought and written." l " The 
vogue of books," he writes in another passage, "de- 
pends on the taste of different centuries; even what is 
old is exposed to variations of fashion. Corneille and 
Racine, Virgil and Lucan, Seneca and Cicero, Tacitus 
and Livy, Aristotle and Plato, have had the palm only 
in turn. Nay more : in the same life, according to the 
ages, in the same year according to the seasons, and 
sometimes in the same day according to the hours, we 
prefer one book to another book, one style to another 
style, one intellect to another intellect." 2 " In literature 
and in established judgments on authors," says Joubert, 
in language that anticipates Anatole France, " there is 
more conventional opinion than truth. How many books, 
whose reputation is made, would fail to achieve this 
reputation if it had to be won again ! " 3 
1 Tit. xxii, Lxxni. 2 Tit. xxni, clxxvh. 8 Tit. xxni, clxxxiv. 



58 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Though Joubert is thus willing to concede a great 
deal to the element of relativity he is not ready to go 
to the point of seeing in literature merely an expression 
of society. " It is a hundred times better," he says, " to 
suit a work to the nature of the human spirit than to 
what is called the state of society. There is something 
unchanging in man ; and that is why there are unchang- 
ing rules in the arts and in works of art, beauties which 
will always please or modes of expression that will give 
pleasure only for a short time." l II y a quelque chose 
d'immuable dans Vhomme! The writers who are 
themselves likely to endure are those who, like Joubert, 
really perceived this enduring something in man and 
aimed at it. " Heaven," as he says, "is for those who 
think about it." It is equally appropriate that the work 
of Madame de Stael, whose main interest was not in this 
essential aspect of literature, but in literature as the ex- 
pression of society, that is, as the reflection of changing 
circumstances, should itself count less intrinsically than 
relatively and historically. 

Joubert must of course rank below those who were 
truly creative, those who have left a definitive monu- 
ment, who have had not only ideas but also, in his own 
phrase, the house in which to lodge them. 2 He spent so 
much time in meditating his own monument and in 
making sure of the materials that were to enter into it 
that when he had at last made sure, as he tells us, that 

1 Tit. xxin, ccv. 

2 Mes ide'es ! c'est la maison pour les loger qui me coiite a batir (Pen- 
sees, p. 10). 



JOUBERT 59 

he had found what he wanted, it was too late, it was 
time to die. 1 Yet in his own words, "a few memorable 
utterances are enough to make a great spirit illustrious. 
There are thoughts that contain the essence of a whole 
book." 2 His own reputation is likely to rest securely on 
a number of thoughts and utterances of this kind. The 
world cannot afford to forget him, unless indeed the 
gift of intuition, as I have tried to define it, should 
prove more common among critics in the future than it 
has been in the past. 

1 Tit. vii, lxxxtx. 3 Tit. xxm, ccxvn. 



Ill 

CHATEAUBRIAND 

The English writer with whom Chateaubriand is most 
often compared, with whom indeed he compares himself, 
is Byron. The influence of Byron in England, however, 
was slight as compared with his influence on the con- 
tinent, whereas the influence of Chateaubriand, negligi- 
ble outside of France, dominates the whole of modern 
French literature. " Chateaubriand," M. Faguet wrote 
some time ago, "is the greatest date in the literary his- 
tory of France since the Pleiade. He ends a literary 
evolution of nearly three centuries and a new evolution 
taking its rise in him still endures and will long 
continue. . . . He is the man who renewed the French 
imagination." 1 Nowadays we should perhaps be more 
inclined to date the evolution of which M. Faguet speaks 
from Rousseau, and to look on Chateaubriand himself 
as merely the eldest son of Jean-Jacques. 

The relationship to Rousseau is the common bond 
between Chateaubriand and Byron. They both exhibit 
differences from Rousseau due in large measure to an 
aristocratic rather than a plebeian origin. They also 
differ from one another in that Chateaubriand cham- 
pioned the Middle Ages, monarchy, and Catholicism, 
whereas Byron waged war on authority and tradition. 

i XlX'Siecle, 71. 



CHATEAUBRIAND 61 

Yet their resemblance to each other and to their com- 
mon literary ancestor is manifest in their solitary com- 
munings with nature, and in the way each is " possessed 
by the demon of his heart." In both men we have 
Rousseauism with an added touch of wildness and mis- 
anthropy. They both suffer like Rousseau from an un- 
reconciled antinomy between thought and feeling (" My 
heart and my head do not seem to belong to the same 
individual"), and in both cases this opposition appears 
strikingly in their literary opinions. 

"The taste of Chateaubriand," says M. Merlet, "was 
of a different school from his talent. He defended tradi- 
tion by his doctrines, at the same time that he corrupted 
or renewed it by his example." 1 In much the same fash- 
ion Byron exalted Pope in theory while he was actually 
overthrowing the school of Pope by his practice. "I 
look upon this as the declining age of English poetry," 
he says in his letter to Bowles, and he goes on to express 
his shame that he himself had been one of the builders 
of the new Babel. He and his fellow romanticists were 
sailing splendidly it might be, but on the wrong tack. 
With Byron in this consciously critical vein we may com- 
pare Chateaubriand as he appears in a passage like the 
following: "Furthermore I am not like Rousseau an 
enthusiast over savages and, although I have perhaps as 
much ground to complain of society as this philosopher 
had to be satisfied with it, I do not think that pare 
nature is the most beautiful thing in the world. I have 
always found it very ugly, wherever I have had the op- 

1 Tableau de la litterature francaise (1800-1815), in, 157. 



62 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

portunity to see it. Far from being of the opinion that 
the man who thinks is a depraved animal, 1 I believe it 
is thought that makes man. With this word nature uni- 
versal havoc has been wrought. Let us paint nature, 
but selected nature {la belle nature). Art should not 
concern itself with the imitation of monsters." Chateau- 
briand has the assurance to write this in the preface to 
" Atala," a work in which he betrays on every page his 
passion for the primitive, and in which, so far from 
avoiding the monstrous in the name of la belle nature, 
he shows, as Sainte-Beuve points out, a special predilec- 
tion for crocodiles ! 

Though according to his most recent critic, M. Le- 
maitre, he had strange lacunse in his own taste and put 
no serious check on his imagination, he had thoughts on 
taste and genius and the classic age that would be 
countersigned by Voltaire : " If genius brings forth, it 
is taste that preserves : without taste genius is only a 
sublime folly. Strange circumstance that this delicate 
tact should be still rarer than the creative gift ! Intel- 
lect and genius are diffused rather evenly throughout the 
centuries ; but there are in these centuries only certain 
nations, and in these nations only certain moments, 
in which taste is revealed in all its purity; before or 
afterwards everything offends by lack or excess." 2 He 

1 Contrast with this edifying prof ession of faith in reason the following: 
" On montre a Heidelberg un tonneau de'mesure', Colise'e en mine des ivro- 
gnes ; du moins aucun chre'tien n'a perdu la vie dans cet amphitheatre des 
Vespasiens du Rhin; la raison, oui : ce n'est pas grande perte." {Mem. d? 
Outre-Tombe, 4 juin, 1833.) 

2 Essai sur la lit. ang. 



CHATEAUBKIAND 63 

stood for the clear-cut type (la distinction des genres 
est nee de la nature meme), and yet by his own style was 
encouraging one of the most fundamental of confusions, 
that between prose and poetry. He did more than any 
one else to popularize local color and at the same time 
pointed out its futility. " The genius of Racine borrows 
nothing from the cut of the clothes. . . . People imitate 
arm-chairs and velvet when they no longer know how to 
portray the character of the man seated on this velvet 
and in these arm-chairs." x Rene mocks at the malady 
of Rene. " Lord Byron," he says, " has founded a deplor- 
able school. I presume that he has been as much afflicted 
at the Childe Harolds to whom he has given birth as I am 
at the Renes who are dreaming about me. If ' Rene ' did 
not exist I should net write it again. If it were possible 
for me to destroy it I would destroy it. Renes in poetry 
and Renes in prose have sprung up in swarms. Nothing 
has been heard save disjointed phrases of lamentation. 
The only talk has been of winds and storms, of unknown 
words uttered to the clouds and to the night. No scrib- 
bler just out of school who has n't dreamed that he is 
the unhappiest of men, no sixteen-year-old stripling who 
hasn't exhausted life and thought himself tormented 
by his genius, who in the abyss of his thoughts hasn't 
given himself over to his vaguely aspiring passions," etc. 2 
Chateaubriand attributes to the classical influence of 
Fontanes 3 the fact that he had avoided the " roughness " 

1 Essai sur la lit. ang. 2 Mem. d' Outre-Tombe. 

8 Essai sur la lit. ang. Cf . Emile Deschamps : — 
" Fontanes qui veillait, flambeau pur et brillant, 
Comme un autre Boileau, pres de Chateaubriand." 



64 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

•-. 
of his romantic followers. Much, however, of Chateau- 
briand's disparagement of Rousseau, on the one hand, 
and of the romanticists, on the other, is itself a romantic 
trait : he is so filled with the sense of his own unique- 
ness that he would acknowledge neither master nor dis- 
ciples. 

The contradiction between theory and practice is even 
more flagrant in Chateaubriand than in Byron. For 
Byron's laudation of the old literary order actually cor- 
responds to something in his creative writing : he is 
creative in such poems as the " Vision of Judgment" 
as well as in the outgoings of his spirit to the mountains 
and the sea ; he is in short a far less romantic personage 
than Chateaubriand. He shows himself less aloof from 
society than the Frenchman, even in his satire of it. 
Chateaubriand is thoroughly creative only when utter- 
ing his own nostalgia and nympholeptic longings, or 
when rendering suggestively the aspects of outer nature 
(these moods are of course often blended). There was, 
in Joubert's phrase, a " talisman " that clung to his 
fingers, and he used this gift of glamour, not for intel- 
lectual ends, but to enrich and deepen the life of the 
senses. " He is the man," says M. Lemaitre, " who in* 
troduced into French the most music, the most images, 
the most perfumes, the most suave contacts, so to speak, 
and the most delights, and who wrote the most intoxi- 
cating phrases on voluptuousness and death." * On the 
creative side he has far less intellectual breadth than 
Byron, but is far superior to him as a critic. As soon as 
1 Chateaubriand, 342. 



CHATEAUBRIAND 65 

Byron reflected, says Goethe, he was a child ; and then, 
too, he did not have at his side such "guardian angels" 
as Fontanes and Joubert. The point of view of the 
Letter to Bowles is on the whole pseudo-classic. Now 
Chateaubriand also had his pseudo-classical side which 
unfortunately overflows at times into what should have 
been his creative writing. He says in one of his ro- 
mantic moods that he knew a Breton folk-song one 
line of which was worth more than all the twelve cantos 
of the "Henriade." Yet a large portion of his own 
"Martyrs" is at least as artificial as the "Henriade," 
and precisely in the same manner. He substitutes, in 
fact, a literary Christianity for a literary paganism, and 
in such a way as to justify Boileau's warning against 
the use of religious mysteries as vain literary ornaments. 
He has as implicit a faith in poetic "machines" as 
Father Le Bossu, and in few pseudo-epics is the creak- 
ing of the pullies with which this " machinery " is man- 
aged so painfully audible as in the " Martyrs." 

But along with this pseudo-classicism Chateaubriand 
had a genuinely classical side, in other words a genuine 
perception of form. He would not have been capable 
like Byron of comparing Pope to a Greek temple. He 
can speak admirably on occasion of the " antique sym- 
metry." 1 His protest against the sentimentality of the 

1 As, for example, in the following passage : " Les modernes sont en 
ge'ne'ral plus savants, plus de*licats, plus de'lie's, souvent meme plus inte"- 
ressants dans leurs compositions que les anciens ; mais ceux-ci sont plus 
simples, plus augustes, plus tragiques, plus abondants et surtout plus vrais 
que les modernes. lis ont un gout plus sur, une imagination plus noble : 
Us ne savent travailler que l'ensemble, et negligent les ornements ; un 



66 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

eighteenth century has often been cited in illustration 
of his instinct for the grand manner : "It is a dangerous 
mistake, sanctioned, like so many other dangerous mis- 
takes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of 
imagination are those that draw most tears. One could 
name this or that melodrama, which no one would like 
to own having written, and which yet harrows the feel- 
ings far more than the i Aeneid.' The true tears are 
those which are called forth by the bmuty of poetry ; 
there must be as much imagination in them as sorrow. 
They are the tears which come to our eyes when Priam 
says to Achilles : ' And I have endured, — the like 
whereof no soul on earth hath yet endured, — to carry 
to my lips the hand of him who slew my child ' ; or 
when Joseph cries out : ' I am Joseph your brother 
whom ye sold into Egypt/ " * 

We have then in Chateaubriand a somewhat baffling 
interplay of classical, pseudo-classical, and romantic ele- 
ments. The only element that counts, from the point of 
view of his influence even in criticism, is the romantic. 
What men received from him was a certain type of im- 

berger qui se plaint, un vieillard qui raconte, un heros qui combat : voilk 
pour eux tout un poeme, et l'on ne sait comment il arrive que ce poeme, 
ou il n'y a rien, est cependant mieux rempli que nos romans charge's d'in- 
cidents et de personnages. L'art d'e'crire semble avoir suivi l'art de la 
peinture ; la palette du poete moderne se couvre d'une variete* infinie de 
teintes et de nuances ; le poete antique compose ses tableaux avec les 
trois eouleurs du Polygnote." (Genie du Christianisme, 2 e Partie, livre n, 
c. II.) 

1 Preface to Atala. Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, I, 277. Coleridge 
made a similar protest against the theatrical tearfulness of the eighteenth 
century. See Lectures on Shakespeare (Bohn), 124. 






CHATEAUBRIAND 67 

aginative and emotional stimulus, an initiation into the 
new passion and the new revery and the new suggest- 
iveness. What they listened to was not his plea for se- 
lectiveness and " good taste," but his plea for sympathy 
and enthusiasm. His saying that the time had come 
" to substitute for the petty criticism of faults the great 
and fruitful criticism of beauties," ! a saying that only 
echoed Madame de Stael, was taken up by Hugo and 
became a favorite formula for that critique admirative 
so dear to the romanticist, the criticism that is aesthetic 
rather than judicial. Chateaubriand's own applica- 
tion of the aesthetic point of view in the " Genie du 
Christianisme " is above all a reaction from the 
eighteenth century ; or it would be better to say a con- 
tinuation of the quarrel of the eighteenth century of 
Rousseau with the eighteenth century of the philosophes 
and Voltaire. Rousseau himself may perhaps be most 
adequately defined as the great aesthete (using the word 
in its broadest sense, in its derivation from the Greek 
word feeling). The Savoyard Vicar proves God to his 
pupil by showing him the glories of the sunrise over the 
valley of the Po. The transition from this aesthetic 
deism to aesthetic Catholicism is evidently easy. In 
Chateaubriand the rays of the rising sun, in addition to 
falling upon a glorious landscape, also fall upon the 
consecrated wafer which Father Aubry was at that mo- 
ment lifting in the air ; whereupon the narrator exclaims, 

1 This is the form, in which the saying appears in the Preface de Crom- 
well. Chateaubriand's wording is slightly different. See his article on the 
Annales litteraires of Dussault, Feb., 1819. 



68 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

" charm of religion ! magnificence of the Christian 
cult ! " The right title for the " Genie du Christianisme," 
as has been pointed out, would be the Beauties of Christ- 
ianity. Chateaubriand would view everything aesthetic- 
ally — even hell. Dante and Milton have shown that we 
might " possess hells as poetical as those of Homer and 
Virgil." 1 

Chateaubriand boasted that by this work he had de- 
finitively discredited the eighteenth century. " Why," he 
asks, " is this century so inferior to the seventeenth ? 
For it is no longer time to dissimulate the fact; the 
writers of our age have in general been placed too high." 
(Sainte-Beuve was later to take this sentence as motto for 
his own book on Chateaubriand.) " If there is so much 
that is blameworthy in the works of Rousseau and Vol- 
taire, what is to be said of the works of Raynal and Dide- 
rot?" 2 Chateaubriand's explanation of this inferiority 
is, of course, that the eighteenth century was irreligious, 
and irreligious because it was unimaginative, and unim- 
aginative because it was over-analytical. " Cast your eyes 
on the generations that followed the age of Louis XIV. 
Where are those men with calm and majestic faces, with 
noble garb and bearing, with chastened speech . . . ? 
You look for them and no longer find them. Little obscure 
men move about like pigmies under the lofty porticos of the 
monuments of another age. On their hard features are 
stamped egotism and the contempt of God. They have lost 
both the nobility of garb and the purity of speech : you 

1 G. du Christ., 2 e Partie, livre rv, c. xni. 
a G. du Christ, 3 e Partie, livre iv, c. v. 



CHATEAUBRIAND 69 

would take them not for the sons but for the buffoons of 
the great race that went before them. The disciples of 
the new school wither the imagination with I know not 
what truth, which is not the veritable truth. . . . Mod- 
ern writers make use of a narrow philosophy which di- 
vides and subdivides everything, makes precise meas- 
urement of feelings, submits the soul to calculation and 
reduces God and the universe to a passing modifica- 
tion of nothingness." 1 " The spirit of reasoning by de- 
stroying the imagination saps the foundations of the 
fine arts." 2 The sciences always bring on ages of irre- 
ligion, which are followed in close sequence by ages of 
destruction. 3 

These are themes the equivalent of which we can find 
developed in a thousand forms by French, German, and 
English romanticists at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century. Unfortunately, the fact that a person protests 
against analysis and appeals from intellect and analysis 
to the " imagination " or the "heart " or the "soul," or, 
like Madame de Stael to "enthusiasm," does not tell 
us all that it might regarding his ultimate point of view. 
Joubert uttered a similar protest against "the man 
who has become so anatomical that he has ceased to 
be a man and sees in the noblest and most touching 
gait only a play of muscles, like an organ manufacturer 
who should hear in the most beautiful music only the 
little clicks of the key-board." 4 But is the " soul " that 
Joubert opposes to this analytical excess the "soul" 

1 G. du Christ, 3 e Partie, livre IV, c. V. 2 Ibid., 3 e Partie, livre I, c. vn. 
3 Ibid., livre n, c. i, et n. 4 Tit. xxttt, clxxxvi. 



70 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

opposed to it by the romanticist? That is the crucial 
question. The same ambiguity clings to the word " soul" 
as to the words "heart" and "intuition/' which I dis- 
cussed in the last chapter. The " soul " of Chateau- 
briand is plainly a Rousseauistic and not, like that of 
Joubert, a Platonic " soul." Formulae of this kind must, 
of course, be applied with great caution to the mysterious 
unity of a living spirit — especially when the spirit is 
that of a man of genius like Chateaubriand. I for one 
should not deny him greatness of soul in any sense. Yet 
he is in the main intuitive of the Many and not of the 
One, and what he has to offer us therefore is not wisdom, 
but aesthetic perceptiveness. 

Now aesthetic perceptiveness is in itself a precious 
thing, but to claim that because you are aesthetically 
perceptive you are therefore religious is to fall into the 
underlying romantic error, which may be defined as try- 
ing to make the things that are below the intellect do 
duty for those that are above it. " Incredulity," says 
Chateaubriand, " is the principal cause of the decadence 
of taste and genius." * We recognize here the central 
thesis of Ruskin. It is already a dangerous confusion to 
refer art and religion to a common source. A man may 
be truly religious without being in the least artistic, and 
conversely (though we should add that art and religion 
may and usually do interact in a thousand ways). The 
confusion becomes positively pernicious when the com : 
mon ground on which both art and religion are made to 
rest is mere aestheticism. Sensible people feel a peculiar 

1 G.du Christ, 3 e Partie, livre iv, c. v. 



CHATEAUBRIAND « 71 

exasperation when romantic aesthetes like Rousseau and 
Ruskin and Chateaubriand set themselves up as religious 
teachers. They feel instinctively that something is wrong, 
even when unable to trace clearly the nature of the error. 
To lack true inwardness like Chateaubriand and at the 
same time to become the champion of religion is simply 
to substitute a pose for reality. " He never questions 
himself," says Joubert in the letter on Chateaubriand to 
which I have already referred, " unless it be to find out 
whether the exterior parts of his soul, I mean his taste 
and imagination, are content, whether his thought is 
harmoniously rounded and his phrases musical, whether 
his images are vivid, etc. ; caring little whether it is all 
intrinsically good : that is his smallest concern." J And 
therefore we may say with Sainte-Beuve, that we are not 
in the year 1800 at the dawn of a great literary age, but 
merely of one of the most brilliant periods of decline. 

Chateaubriand's slight regard for the truth of Christ- 
ianity as compared with its aesthetic charm is one of 
the commonplaces of criticism. He has been charged 
with preferring beauty to truth, but it might be less 
misleading to say illusion to reality, since beauty after 
all is more than mere sestheticism. His aim, as he tells 
us, is less to convince our intellects than to enchant our 
imaginations. To the meagreness of the intellectual as 
compared with the aesthetic appeal of the " Genie du 
Christianisme " is due, no doubt, the fact that it has so 
largely ceased to interest. " But one half -pennyworth of 
bread," we are tempted to exclaim, as so often in roman- 

1 Cor. t 108-9. 



72 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

tic writing, " to this intolerable deal of sack ! " He finds 
a proof of original sin in the mode of locomotion of the 
serpent; the three Graces are used as an argument in 
favor of the Trinity ; the celibacy of priests is backed 
up by the virginity of bees. He points out that " nature 
has not been as delicate as disbelievers ... It has be- 
stowed the form of the cross upon a whole family of 
flowers." 1 He proves the necessity of the Sabbath from 
the fact that " the ox cannot labor nine days in succes- 
sion. On the seventh day his plaintive bellowings call 
for the repose ordained by the Creator." 2 

If we trace the influence of Chateaubriand we find at 
the beginning aesthetic and mediaeval Christians, then 
aesthetic mediaevalists, and finally aesthetes who are 
neither medievalists nor Christians. The essential ele- 
ment from the start was the aestheticism. Though he 
failed to convert French writers as a class to Catholicism, 
even aesthetic Catholicism, he did lure them into the 
tower of ivory. He encouraged them to cultivate their 
sensorium and neglect their intellect. The heart and 
head of the century were thus put into opposition with 
each other. It is partly due to Chateaubriand that, M. 
Faguet was enabled to write his studies of modern French 
writers in two series — the men of imagination in one 
series and the thinkers in another. It is a singular piece 
of good fortune for the Germans that their chief modern 
writer is not merely a great imaginative and emotional, 
but also a great intellectual, force. The contrast is 
striking in this respect between Goethe and Chateau- 

1 G. du Christ. 4 e Partie, livre i, c. n. a Ibid., c. iv. 



CHATEAUBRIAND 73 

briand; and still more striking between Goethe and 
Hugo. 

Chateaubriand appears to far better advantage when 
he is dealing with Christianity not in itself, but in its 
relation to art and literature. Parts n and in of the 
" Genie du Christianisme " which treat of this relation, 
exhibit the somewhat baffling interplay I have already 
noted between classic, pseudo-classic, and romantic ele- 
ments ; and for this reason, no doubt, they have been 
somewhat variously judged, though on the whole more 
favorably than the other parts of the work. Sainte-Beuve 
seems especially conscious of the classic note. 1 He dis- 
covers in Chateaubriand a native instinct for literary ex- 
cellence that has been fortified and enriched by humanis- 
tic memories ; and so, though making sharp reservations 
as to the general thesis, he accords hearty praise to the 
details. " All that portion of the work," says Sainte- 
Beuve, " in which the author compares the natural char- 
acters in antiquity and among the moderns" (e.g. the 
comparison of husband and wife in Milton's Adam and 
Eve with the Ulysses and Penelope of Homer) . . . 
" abounds in delicate beauties and exquisite shadings : it 
is literary criticism in the grand manner." He goes on 
to say that " the best substance of classic French criti- 
cism should be sought in such pages." Scherer, on the 
contrary, though he admits that Chateaubriand ren- 
dered at times with a certain eloquence the impression 
produced on him by what he read, is conscious in 
the very comparisons singled out by Sainte-Beuve for 

1 Chat, et son groupe litteraire, I, 318 ff. 



74 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

special praise of something set and formal and, in a 
word, pseudo-classic. They still lack the modern keen- 
ness of characterization. Chateaubriand for his part, 
who was of course the very last person to underestimate 
his own merits, observes in the "Memoires d'Outre- 
Tombe" : "The paragraphs in which I deal with the 
influence of our religion in our manner of seeing and 
painting . . . the chapters which I devote to investi- 
gating the new feelings introduced into the dramatic 
characters of antiquity, contain the germs of the new 
criticism." 

In the comparisons of which he speaks Chateaubriand 
is served both by his classic taste and his romantic in- 
stinct. According as his mood is predominantly roman- 
tic or classical, he can oppose to pagan antiquity either 
the Middle Ages or the French seventeenth century, 
which was at once classical and Christian. Like other 
French reactionaries, including Joubert, he exalts Bos- 
suet, " who loves to let fall from his lips those great 
words ' time ' and t death ' which reecho in the silent 
depths of eternity." It is but natural that the author of 
the " Martyrs " should show a special predilection for the 
two chief representatives of the Christian epic, Tasso 
and Milton. His thesis imposed upon him the somewhat 
difficult task of proving that the personages of Tasso, 
being at once Christian and mediaeval, are more poeti- 
cal than those of Homer. The combination in Milton 
of the grand manner with a Christian subject made 
a special appeal to Chateaubriand. Furthermore, we 
should not forget that he spent a number of the most 



CHATEAUBRIAND 75 

formative years of his youth in England and that the 
English influence is very visible in him. A chief pro- 
duct of this influence was his translation of Milton and 
the somewhat rambling and superficial study of Eng- 
lish literature which he wrote to accompany it. At times 
the intrusion into this study of the note of romantic 
egotism (as, for example, where he says : " Now that in 
our two countries monarchy is inclining towards its end, 
Milton and I no longer have any political quarrel with 
each other ") * anticipates, though faintly, Hugo's ex- 
traordinary rhapsody on Shakespeare. 

We have seen that Chateaubriand differed from 
Scherer and Sainte-Beuve in emphasizing especially the 
element of novelty in his own criticism. For example, he 
shows — "a thing that had not been at all understood 
previously — that with the same names and under some- 
what similar outer forms the characters of Racine and 
Euripides express entirely different sentiments. Phaedra 
in Racine is no longer a pagan but an erring Christian 
wife," etc. I believe that Chateaubriand puts us on the 
track here of his real influence as a critic. The lesson 
the new criticism took to heart was that it should pene- 
trate beyond the mere form of a work of art to the soul. 

But here again it is necessary to remember that the 
word "soul" is in itself ambiguous. Behind the mere 
outer form of a work of art there may be two " souls " 
(both only to be apprehended intuitively), a soul in vir- 
tue of which it has a general and representative value, 
and a soul in virtue of which it is unique. Both kinds 

1 Last paragraph of Essai sur la lit. ang. 



76 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

of soul appear vitally fused in the work of art that is 
completely beautiful — one making itself felt as sym- 
metry and repose, as inner form we may say, the other as 
individual life and expression. Stated Platonically the 
complete work of art suggests to us through the medium 
of the imagination the presence of the One in the 
Many. Now the soul that Chateaubriand instinctively 
seizes upon and renders is not the soul that makes 
for form and symmetry, but the soul that makes for 
expression (though he leans less one-sidedly towards 
expression than, for instance, Kuskin). 

Moreover, he not only responds aesthetically to the 
present object and renders it in its uniqueness but he 
also has the gift, closely associated in its origins with 
romantic nostalgia, of journeying imaginatively in time 
and space, and then conveying vividly what is either 
temporally or spatially remote. For example, he does 
not give us an adequate idea of the Christianity of the 
period he has treated in his "Martyrs" — that would 
have required more insight into the permanent element 
in human nature than he possessed. He is, in fact, more 
at home with the paganism of the period, because behind 
his facade of sesthetie Catholicism, he himself lived 
more on the pagan than on the Christian level. What 
he does do at his best is to conjure up before our inner 
eye a vision of what was peculiar to the period, of its 
individual expression, of the precise picturesque details 
by which it differed from all other periods. This art of 
local color evidently concerns the historian at least as 
much as the literary critic ; and Chateaubriand counts 



CHATEAUBKIAND 77 

among the important initiators into the new historical 
spirit. The whole shifting of emphasis from the perma- 
nent to the local and transitory aspects of human nature 
is so well brought out in Augustin Thierry's account of 
Chateaubriand's influence upon him that I must quote 
from it in spite of its familiarity. Thierry, we should 
remember, though he prepared the way for Michelet and 
for the French romantic school of history in general, 
showed for his own part an almost Attic moderation in 
his use of the new picturesqueness. 

Thierry, then, relates how in 1810 he read "Les 
Martyrs " in the vaulted class-room of the College de 
Blois while his fellow-students were off on a walk. He 
was especially moved by the narrative of Eudore, " that 
living history of the empire in its decline," and con- 
trasted the style with that of his text-book : " Clovis, 
son of King Childeric, mounted the throne in 484 and 
strengthened by his victories the foundations of the 
French monarchy," etc. . . . " Nothing had given me any 
idea of those terrible Franks of M. de Chateaubriand, 
those Franks dressed in the spoils of bears, sea-calves, 
buffaloes, and wild boars ; of that entrenched camp with 
its leather boats and its chariots drawn by great oxen ; 
of that army drawn up in a triangle in which you could 
distinguish, in the midst of a forest of lances, only 
skins of wild beasts and half -naked bodies . . . The 
impression produced on me by the war-song of the 
Franks had in it something electrical. I left the place 
where I was seated and, walking up and down the room, 
I repeated aloud, making my feet ring out on the pave- 






78 MODEEN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ment : ' Pharamond ! Pharamond ! we have fought with the 
sword,' etc. . . . This moment of enthusiasm was perhaps 
decisive for my future vocation . . . This is my debt to 
the writer of genius who opens and dominates the new 
literary age. All those who in different directions are 
advancing along the pathways of this age have encoun- 
tered him in the same way at the source of their studies, 
at their first inspiration ; there is no one of them who 
might not fittingly say to him, as Dante said to Virgil : 

' Tu duca, tu signore, e tu maestro/ " 1 

We thus see history ceasing to be abstract and colorless 
and becoming concrete and expressive ; we see it getting 
rid of its old artificial unity and cultivating instead a 
sense of the variable in human nature — a sense that 
is not tempered by any new and vital perception of unity. 
Thierry possibly overstates Chateaubriand's influence 
upon himself and others. But it is evident that although 
Chateaubriand posed as a champion of the old order 
and the fixed standards it implied, by the actual force 
of his example he helped forward to an important ex- 
tent the main movement of the century in both history 
and literary criticism from the absolute to the relative. 

1 Preface to Recits des temps merovingiens. 



IV 



THE TRANSITION TO SAINTE-BEUVE 
VILLEMAIN — COUSIN NISARD 

French criticism throughout the first half of the nine- 
teenth century may be studied almost entirely in terms of 
the romantic movement. There is an extreme " right " 
of strict traditionalists opposed to an extreme "left" of 
literary radicals, a " centre " and a "left-centre" that 
welcome the more moderate innovations, etc. This crit- 
ical alignment either for or against romanticism, which 
was more or less obscured during the second half of 
the century, is reappearing in our own days, except per- 
haps that there are fewer intermediary shades of opinion 
between extreme "right" and extreme "left." Nowa- 
days those who are conservative in literature are at least 
superficially consistent in being religious and political 
conservatives as well ; whereas in the earlier period there 
was a curious confusion in this matter that I have already 
touched on in speaking of the critics of the Empire. 
The political radicals were often the most " classical " 
in literature, whereas the romantic innovators were wont 
to pose, in the wake of Chateaubriand, as champions 
of the "throne and altar." It took Hugo, who began as 
a royalist and Christian of this type, several years to 
discover that romanticism is after all only " liberalism 
in literature." 



80 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

The battle between the opposing literary factions was 
carried on by means of pamphlets, prefaces and articles 
in newspapers and reviews. Literary journalism has 
never been more flourishing in France than during the 
Restoration and the early days of the July Monarchy. 
" La Muse Francaise " (July, 1823, to July, 1824) was a 
typical organ of the romanticists in their early phase. 
It was very reactionary politically, admired the " Mar- 
tyrs, " and opposed, above all, the criticism of beauties, 
to the criticism of faults. At the opposite extreme was 
the politically liberal " Constitutional." Romanticist 
in this journal was synonymous with foreigner and re- 
actionary, and at times with lunatic. " Romanticism," 
we read, " is not a subject of ridicule ; it is a disease 
like somnambulism or epilepsy." A romanticist is a man 
who is beginning to lose his mind: " you must pity him, 
talk reason to him, bring him around gradually ; you 
can't make of him the subject of a comedy, however, 
but at most of a medical thesis." x Beyond all doubt 
the most distinguished of these literary journals was 
the " Globe " (1824-1831), on which Goethe bestowed 
his admiration, noting especially the articles of \the 
youthful Sainte-Beuve on Hugo. The " Globe " did as 
much as any journal of the time to help forward 
the new cosmopolitanism we have associated with Ma- 
dame de Stael, and was especially active in behalf of 
Shakespeare. 

To the strict traditionalists of this period the purity 

1 Quoted in Petit de Julleville, Hist, de la langue et de la litteraturefran- 
<;aise t vn, 690. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NISARD 81 

and very integrity of the French language seemed to be 
menaced by a universal invasion of foreign influences. 
We read in one of the comic papers, as early as 1814, 
of the articles of a " romantic confederation." England 
and Germany are to be represented in this confederation 
by Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant ; Prussia, 
Russia, Austria, etc., by " le sieur " Schlegel ; Italy and 
Spain* by Sismondi and his " Literatures of the South." 
" The purpose of the confederation is to introduce into 
French, on the one hand, the obscurities of the lan- 
guages of the North, and, on the other, the conceits 
and bombast of the south, and to continue the process 
until Frenchmen no longer understand one another." 1 
Though a vast machinery was organized at this time for 
opening up a knowledge of foreign literatures, the ro- 
mantic movement appears far more cosmopolitan than it 
really was. The hopes that the " Globe " and its editors 
inspired in Goethe were not fulfilled. Too many of the 
promising youths of this period were drafted into poli- 
tics after the July Revolution. The romantic leaders 
were as a class rather innocent of foreign influences — 
indeed, of deep intellectual culture of any kind — unless 
we regard the influence of Rousseau and his French fol- 
lowers as a foreign intrusion into the pure French tra- 
dition. For even the two foreign influences that seem 
all-powerful at this time, those of Byron and Scott, do 
little more than affect the surface manifestations of the 
great main movement which comes down from Rousseau 

1 Nainjaune, 20 Dec, 1814 ; quoted in Maigron, Le Roman historique 
a Vepoque romantique, 155. 



82 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

and Chateaubriand. Byron helped forward the revolt 
against all kinds of authority, including literary author- 
ity ; Scott cooperated powerfully with Chateaubriand in 
teaching the new art of travelling imaginatively in time 
and space. The fashion for local color and historical 
romance that was set by Scott has importance only as 
it testifies to something deeper, the tendency, namely, 
to see life and literature not absolutely but relatively 
and historically. 

I 

The advance towards a more historical and cosmo- 
politan point of view at this time was due, not merely to 
the diffusion of a knowledge of foreign literatures and 
to journals like the " Globe," but to the influence of 
three eminent professors. Perhaps the most stirring 
events in the politically dull days of the Restoration 
were the public lectures given by Villemain, Cousin, and 
Guizot. We hear of two thousand eager auditors at the 
courses of Cousin during the years 1828 to 1830. The 
originality of Cousin, Villemain, and Guizot was to in- 
fuse something of the new historical method into the 
domains respectively of philosophy, literary criticism, 
and history itself. Like the " Globe " with which they 
were more or less affiliated, and in which the lectures 
of Cousin and Villemain were published, all three lec- 
turers were " left-centre " and continued Madame de 
Stael. Guizot carried into history the idea of integral 
and organic development; he did not isolate political 
history but related it to the other manifestations of 
the life and activity of a particular country and time. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NISAKD 83 

Guizot, however, is very far from being a pure relativ- 
ist. He was a leader of the " doctrinaires " ; the ad- 
miration for parliamentary liberalism that had been 
inspired in Madame de Stael by the spectacle of Eng- 
land tended to harden in Guizot and the other doctrin- 
aires into a political creed. He was too anxious to im- 
pose the discipline of this creed upon both past and 
present. In other words he had a philosophy of history, 
and the danger of a philosophy of history is always to 
force the infinite and living complexity of the facts into 
a somewhat arbitrary intellectual mould. 

Cousin is distinctly inferior to Guizot in constructive 
power. The eclectic philosophy or " spiritualism " that 
he evolved is a somewhat indeterminate compound of 
religion and rationalism, alike unsatisfactory to the su- 
pernaturalist and the pure philosopher of nature. He 
made of it for many years, however, a very effective in- 
strument of domination over French higher education. 
Cousin's real originality consists in having converted 
philosophy into the history of philosophy. He visited 
Germany, and in his interpretations of German think- 
ers, especially Hegel, to the French public, he continued 
the pioneer work of which Madame de Stael had set the 
example. He had, indeed, many of the instincts of the 
explorer and intellectual adventurer. This disposition 
became even more visible when later he turned from 
philosophy to literature — especially to the literature of 
the first part of the seventeenth century in France. He 
took possession of this new field with infinite zest, and 
established himself in it as a conqueror. He showed 



84 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

something o£ the gift of the actor in the way he identi- 
fied himself imaginatively with the personages of the 
period, especially with the heroines of the Fronde. His 
very style with its seventeenth-century flavor is itself, 
in some degree, a histrionic impersonation, and can 
scarcely be said in any case to be the man. Cousin 
himself was impetuous and extreme, impatient of any 
outer check and unwilling to impose any check upon 
himself ; and in this respect he was very far from the 
seventeenth century. By the gusto with which he dwelt 
on the charms of some of his heroines he exposed him- 
self to various pleasantries. "He set out," said Sainte- 
Beuve, "to found a great system of philosophy — and 
fell in love with Madame de Longueville." 1 He not 
only showed a lover's partisanship, an unwillingness to 
admit any blemishes in the beloved object, but also a 
lover's jealousy. Sainte-Beuve relates how rudely he 
was "elbowed" by Cousin when he ventured to intrude 
on his preserve. Later Cousin's jealousy diminished, 
because, as he explained, "I love elsewhere." 

The tendency to entrench one's self in a single field 
and then to allow one's comprehension of this field and 
sympathy for it to override one's judgment and sense 
of proportion are traits that we associate with the mod- 
ern specialist. In fact we find in Cousin just that mixture 
of enthusiasm and insistence on the new and undiscov- 
ered fact, of romance and science in short, with which we 
are so familiar in our philological investigators. From 
this point of view Cousin's discovery of the original 

1 Lundis, vi, 166. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NISARD 85 

text of the " Pensees " of Pascal, and the presentation 
of his discovery to the Academy in 1843, mark an epoch. 
The discovery in itself was very much worth while, but 
the direction it gave to French scholarship and criticism 
inspired some disquietude in the humanistic observer. 
Critics sought in the wake of Cousin to shine not so 
much by their judgment and ideas and taste as by pro- 
ducing some unpublished fact or document from the 
archives of the seventeenth century or elsewhere. The 
Conrart papers, Sainte-Beuve complained, had become 
a mine of glory, and he added that Conrart's handwrit- 
ing was extremely legible. Cousin, in short, did as much 
as any man of his time to inaugurate in France what has 
been termed the age of frenzied research, that fureur de 
Finidit which Brunetiere was to attack later, and which 
after all has been less disastrous to literary standards in 
France than in several other countries. 

n 

Villemain was without the faults and also to some 
degree without the virtues of the original investigator. 
His instinct was not so much to consider things in them- 
selves as with a view to their oratorical effect. There 
are too many suggestions in his style of the flowers of 
the ancient rhetoric. He has even been accused of think- 
ing first of a fine phrase and then of what he was going 
to put into it. He was less paradoxical than Cousin 
and had a surer taste in the traditional sense. His great 
merit indeed is to combine taste, as the word would 
have been understood by Voltaire and La Harpe, with 



86 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the sense of historical relativity. Villemain's most effect- 
ive lectures are those on the literature of the eighteenth 
century, and are an application to this period of the 
new cosmopolitan spirit. He undertakes to show the 
interrelationship during this period of French, English, 
and Italian civilizations, their " cross-fire upon one an- 
other," to use his own phrase, and at the same time the 
way eighteenth-century life thus studied in its totality 
finds its counterpart in certain literary forms. " What 
should have concerned Voltaire," he says, apropos of 
the "Henriade," "are not the rules imposed upon the 
epic, but the social conditions that allow it to arise." 1 
Since literature is even more the outcome of social con- 
ditions than of individual choice, the edge is taken off 
one's censure. "Lesage," he says, "has been sharply 
criticised for having a prosaic habit of mind. What we 
see especially in this habit of mind is the mark of those 
last years of Louis XIV which melt together so perfectly 
with the first years of the Regency." 2 Villemain also 
relates the work to the author, as when he sees in the 
adventures of " Manon Lescaut " a reflection of the in- 
cidents of Prevost's own life. 

The relationship established by Villemain between the 
work and the author, or between the work and the age, 
is, as compared with that of later adepts in the histor- 
ical method, somewhat lax. The historical and critical 
elements seem at times to lie side by side and not, as in 
Sainte-Beuve, to interpenetrate. 

1 Lit. au xvur siecle, 1, 164. * Ibid., I, 251. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NISARD 87 

in 

Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin all three combine in- 
novation with strongly conservative aud traditional ele- 
ments; they are, as I have already said, "left-centre." 
The most distinguished representative of the extreme 
"right," that is, of literary conservatism during this 
period, is undoubtedly Desire Nisard. The role played 
by Nisard in the first half of the century is somewhat 
similar to that played by Brunetiere in our own day. 
The difference in the two men appears in Brunetiere's 
complaint that he finds in Nisard " so little history, I 
mean so few dates, so few facts, so little biography." x In 
short, Nisard has less historic sense than Brunetiere, less 
logical vigor, less science (and also less pseudo-science) ; 
he has, however, more native fineness of taste. 

Nisard' s reactionary spirit appears in the first place 
in the fact that he is neither a nationalist nor a cosmo- 
politan in Madame de StaeTs sense. He protests against 
the " chimera of a purely national literature." 2 On the 
other hand, he says that " no nation can imitate foreign 
literatures successfully. In France, this imitation is 
deadly to the writer." 3 What is precious in literature 
must be not purely national, but universal and human ; 
you are to escape however from national limitations, not 
by mere comprehension and sympathy, but by a definite 
discipline in the great humanistic and religious tradi- 
tions, in what Nisard calls the twofold antiquity, class- 
ical and Christian. He looked on the new cosmopoli- 
tanism of comprehension and sympathy as a menace to 

1 VEvolutim de la critique, 212. a Histoire, I, 239. 3 Ibid., 358. 



88 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

some of the finest qualities in French literature. Accord- 
ing to Goethe, as we have seen, Madame de Stael broke 
down the Chinese wall that separated Germany from 
France. Nisard would have been in favor of raising this 
wall again. The primary need is not knowledge but dis- 
cipline. Now, to get discipline we must have a strong 
central authority and look with suspicion on all depart- 
ures from the norm. The authority that Nisard sets up 
is a certain conception of the French spirit, which in its 
higher manifestations coincides, he would have us be- 
lieve, with the human spirit itself. Departures from the 
French spirit or human spirit thus conceived are granted 
only grudgingly. Nisard is as unflinching as Brune- 
tiere in sacrificing the sens propre or individual sense 
to the sens commun or general sense. Other countries 
are " more favorable to liberty, which is full of perils 
and aberrations, than to discipline. . . . On the contrary, 
the French spirit is more inclined to discipline than to 
liberty. ... The man of genius in France is he who says 
what everybody knows." l Nisard will not allow that the 
general sense as expressed in tradition could have erred. 
He is at the opposite pole from those modern scholars 
who are forever reversing the verdicts of the past, white- 
washing what is traditionally black, and black washing 
what is traditionally white. In the case of Ronsard, for 
example, he says : " Boileau has spoken. All that is left 
is to give reasons in support of this judgment." 2 It 
goes without saying that the French spirit came to its 
perfect maturity, that is, coincided most fully with the 

1 Histoire, 1, 14. 2 Histoire, I, 362. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NISARD 89 

human spirit, in the age of Louis XIV. Nisard adopts 
indeed in a somewhat extreme form the theory of the 
"classic age," before or after which everything errs, 
either by deficiency or excess. The French spirit it- 
self can hardly be said to have come into existence at 
any particular time. It seems to exist out of time and 
space, in some scholastic heaven of its own, and from 
this altitude to smile down on any individual who has 
caught some of its lineaments. As Nisard says, the 
French spirit " recognized itself " in this individual. 
Now the French spirit could not recognize itself in the 
men of the Middle Ages who were still infantile, and 
so Nisard, like Brunetiere, was disdainful of the Middle 
Ages. He finds, indeed, only intermittent gleams of the 
French spirit until he gets almost to the threshold of 
the seventeenth century. Having reached the seven- 
teenth century he heaves a sigh of relief, and instals 
himself in it as in the centre of his subject. Of the four 
volumes of his "History " two are devoted to this period. 
In the seventeenth century itself he is partial to what is 
most authoritative and disciplinary. Light is thrown 
on his predilections by the actual number of pages he 
devotes to different authors. Montaigne receives thirty- 
two pages, Moliere forty-four, La Fontaine thirty-seven : 
on the other hand, one hundred and twenty pages are 
devoted to Boileau, one hundred and thirty to Bossuet, 
and one hundred to Louis XIV himself ! 

In thus making everything in French literature con- 
verge on a single point or centre, Nisard is led to estab- 
lish a sort of literary profit and loss account. All those 



90 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

works in which the French spirit recognizes itself are 
set down among the gains ; those works, on the other 
hand, in which the pure lineaments of the French spirit 
are obscured and which prepare the descent from the 
luminous summits of the seventeenth century are reck- 
oned among the pertes. "If it be true," he says, 
"that the perfection of the French spirit in the seven- 
teenth century consisted in the inner union of the two 
antiquities, pagan and Christian, the day when this 
union is broken will see a decline in the French spirit, 
and the day of perfect works will have passed. What ! 
decadence already ? Let us avoid the word if you wish, 
but do not let us be blinded to the facts . . . Let us 
call by some other name the change that took place in 
French literature in the eighteenth century, provided it 
be not by the name of progress, provided the gains do 
not blind us to the losses." J 

Nisard anticipates later reactionaries in his attack on 
Rousseau as thefons et origo malorum, as the man 
who did more than any one else to corrupt the integrity 
of the French spirit and prepare the triumph of the in- 
dividual sense over the general sense as embodied in 
tradition. Rousseau carried the love of singularity so 
far, he says, that " he looked with more complacency on 
the evil that was his own than on the good he possessed 
in common with other people." 2 Yet this innovator 
who proceeds on the principle that everybody was wrong 
before him never writes better than when he agrees un- 
wittingly with everybody and comes down from his proud 
1 Histoire, TV, .1. 2 Histoire, TV, 454. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NIS ARD 91 

reveries to the speech of experience and ordinary prac- 
tice. Nisard treats Rousseau as the type of the utopist, 
the man who is more interested in reforming the world 
than in reforming himself. Now inasmuch as people of 
this kind were never more numerous than they are to-day, 
Nisard's psychological analysis of the utopist has by no 
means lost its piquancy. Apropos of the " Confessions," 
he says that Rousseau already sets here the example for 
later writers " who have made of their pride one of those 
Carthaginian idols to which they immolate everybody 
who is guilty of being born into the world at the same 
time as themselves." 1 He is, no doubt, here glancing at 
Hugo. 

For Nisard's attitude towards the later romanticists we 
need to turn from the "History " to his miscellaneous 
essays, especially to those which he collected in his volume 
on the romantic school. For two or three years before 
the July Revolution he had himself had, as he tells us, a 
period of romantic aberration, during which he con- 
tributed laudatory articles on Hugo to the " Journal des 
Debats." " But classic good sense returned to me," he 
adds, " at the moment when I had corrupted my style 
sufficiently by affectation and subtlety to be encouraged 
and even enjoyed by several German writers." 2 He cele- 
brated his return to classic good sense by publishing his 
"Manifeste contre la litterature facile," directed espe- 
cially against the inferior forms of romanticism. A lively 
exchange of hostilities followed between him and Jules 
Janin in the " Revue de Paris." There is a strong po- 

1 Histoire, rv, 457. * Essais sur VEcole rom., 166. 



92 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

lemical intention, again, in his " Latin Poets of the De- 
cadence." The value of what might have been a bril- 
liant study of silver Latinity is impaired by the obvious 
desire to develop a parallel between the poets of deca- 
dent Rome and the poets of his own time. In the article 
"Victor Hugo en 1836," he proclaims that Hugo is 
lacking in " reason, taste, and critical sense," and that 
his " literary death is imminent and inevitable." He in- 
sinuates that his prose is better than his verse. Hugo is 
the type of the genius that does not mature. He has 
abundance without progress, and " in a body that is be- 
coming stout an intellect that is growing lean." x Hugo's 
wrath at this article overflowed at intervals for the 
rest of his life. Thirty years later he wrote, " An ass 
that resembles M. Nisard is braying." 

By his attacks on the imaginative unrestraint of Hugo 
and others Nisard laid himself open to the suspicion of 
being himself restrained in this respect because he did 
not have a great deal to restrain. His ideal norm reflects 
at times too clearly the limitations of his own tempera- 
ment. The human spirit is not only identified with the 
French spirit but the French spirit often seems a pro- 
jection of the spirit of Nisard. He is too ready to force 
the complex realities of French literature into the Pro- 
crustean bed of his logical definition, even at the risk 
of mutilation. The classic spirit thus conceived has 
about it something scholastic — something that justi- 
fies too much Taine's absurd identification of it with the 
spirit of abstract reasoning. The way in which Nisard 
1 Essais sur VEcole ram., 280. 



VILLEM AIN — COUSIN — NISARD 93 

relates the abstract reasoning of Descartes to the classic 
spirit also encourages the same error. 1 Sainte-Beuve is 
really nearer classical good sense when he protests, 
" Critic, why have but a single pattern ? " 2 when he 
opposes to the somewhat solemn image of the French 
spirit which Nisard sets up, Voltaire's saying that " we 
French are the whipped cream of Europe," 3 and sees in 
Voltaire himself a Frenchman at least as representative 
as Bossuet. 

Nisard can scarcely be said to have solved the dif- 
ficult problem of being selective without being narrow 
and exclusive, of achieving a concentration that shall 
not at the same time seem a contraction. This problem 
is especially difficult in an age of great expansion like 
that in which he lived. It is hard to deny one's own 
time without appearing unduly negative, without ap- 
pearing to be actuated, like so many French reaction- 
aries, less by love of the past than by hatred of the 
present. " Criticism," says Nisard, " is the general and 
dominating faculty of the nineteenth century ; ... it is 
the soul of all works ; it is mingled with all the genres" 4 
But the criticism that dominates the nineteenth century 
is in many respects the exact opposite of what Nisard 
understood by the term, — it is primarily comprehensive 
and sympathetic and historical, and not, like Nisard's 
own criticism, primarily judicial. At a time when every- 
body was exalting the principle of sympathy, when Hugo 

1 Cf., however, what he says of Boileau: "La raison dans Boileau n'est 
pas la raison d'un geometre," etc. (Histoire, n, 297). 

2 Lundis, xv, 211. 8 Ibid., xi, 466. * Histoire, iv, 541. 



94 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

affirmed that the only proper attitude to assume towards 
genius is " to admire like a brute/' Nisard insisted that 
an author's enemies are more likely to be right about 
him than his admirers; that the worst condition for 
coming to a correct opinion about anything is to look 
on it with the " superstitious eye of love." * Nisard thus 
succeeds at times like Brunetiere in seasoning his con- 
servatism with paradox, in so defending the traditional 
general sense as to affront the general sense of his con- 
temporaries. 

The native fineness of Nisard's taste and judgment 
lends a positive value to many pages of his work quite 
apart from his system; and then, too, the work has in 
a high degree the virtues of its defects. Faulty though 
the system be, its consistent application gives to the 
" History," as a whole, something four-square and mon- 
umental. Sainte-Beuve cannot refrain from contrasting 
rather sadly from this point of view Nisard's perform- 
ance with that of a contemporary with whom he was 
far more in sympathy, — J. J. Ampere, son of the nat- 
uralist. Ampere was highly accomplished in all the new 
historical and cosmopolitan virtues. His intellectual hos- 
pitality was all-embracing. He loved to pass rapidly 
from one country and language to another so as to 
enjoy sudden antitheses of thought and feeling, intel- 
lectual Turkish baths, as Sainte-Beuve puts it. He had 
more than obeyed the injunction of Madame de Stael 
(ilfaut avoir V esprit europeen) and extended his ho- 
rizons even beyond Europe. Sainte-Beuve mentions as 
1 See Histoire, I, 370 and n, 26, etc. 



VILLEMAIN — COUSIN — NISARD 95 

an example of the " lofty dilettanteisms of the spirit " in 
which he indulged, that on one occasion he read a Chin- 
ese book amidst the ruins of Ephesus. 1 The history of 
French literature Ampere was planning would have had 
all kinds of advantages over that of Nisard, but it re- 
mained inferior in one important respect — it was never 
written. He never succeeded in coordinating his super- 
abundant material, in imposing a synthesis upon it. He 
was deficient in that power of pulling himself together 
by which, according to Goethe, the master is first re- 
vealed, and which at all events is necessary if one is 
to get beyond " lofty dilettanteisms of the spirit," and 
achieve a monument. 

One is tempted at times to ask whether modern 
criticism has not lost about as much on one side as it 
has gained on the other, whether its broadening out of 
knowledge and sympathy has not been offset by a de- 
cline in judgment. Modern critics, Sainte-Beuve com- 
plains, will talk marvellously about and around a subject 
but will not commit themselves to the point of saying, 
this is good ; this is bad. 2 Villemain, for instance, lacked 
courage in backing up his instinctive good taste. He 
was too capable of dodging and evasion. For his con- 
temporaries, especially, he was all flattery and compli- 
ance, dominated and fascinated by powerful natures 
like Hugo. 3 Cousin remarked to Sainte-Beuve that there 
was in Villemain a perpetual struggle between Interest 
and Vanity. "Yes," retorted Sainte-Beuve, "and it is 
usually Fear that tips the balance." 4 Of Cousin him- 

1 N. Lundis, xiii, 241. 2 Lundis, I, 382. 

3 Lundis, vni, 491. * Ibid., xi, 191. 



96 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

self Sainte-Beuve says he was a great and eloquent 
spirit and a mediocre character. 1 Mediocrity of charac- 
ter has been known to coexist with high intellectual 
gifts before the nineteenth century. Yet Sainte-Beuve 
is right in insisting on that antinomy between an indef- 
inite widening out of one's horizons and staunch con- 
victions, which had already dawned on Madame de Stael. 
All the modern enrichments of criticism, Sainte-Beuve 
complains, do not take the place of the authority and 
sterling good sense of a Johnson. 2 We cannot help 
reflecting that Sainte-Beuve himself was not very John- 
sonian in his power of imposing his authority. When 
accused of being too compliant towards Chateaubriand 
in his lifetime, he replied that he felt in writing about 
him at that time like the " cricket forced to chirp in the 
lion's maw." 3 Dr. Johnson in his dealings with authors 
had a way of making them feel that they and not he 
were in the lion's maw. 

The whole problem, however, of the relationship be- 
tween comprehension and sympathy, on the one hand, 
and judgment, on the other, is one that we can best 
study in Sainte-Beuve's own work. We have gained in 
this chapter some knowledge of the environment in 
which he spent his formative years. He was one of the 
most assiduous contributors to the "Globe," and fol- 
lowed the lectures of Guizot, Cousin, and Villemain. 

1 Lundis, xi, 472. 2 Lundis, xi, 490. 8 Chateaubriand, I, 18. 



SAINTE-BEUVE (BEFORE 1848) 

Sainte-Beuve's work' is almost unique in the way it 
combines extent with richness and variety. Perhaps no 
other writer has written more than fifty volumes and re- 
peated himself so little, or fallen so rarely, even towards 
the end, below his own best standard. Voltaire's vol- 
umes are still more numerous, but are filled with repeti- 
tion, and often senile repetition at that. One way in which 
Sainte-Beuve avoided repeating himself was by renewing 
himself. He distinguishes no less than ten " literary cam- 
paigns and expeditions " in which he had engaged, " all 
of which," he adds, " need to be judged by themselves 
and as different wholes." x If we are dealing only with 
the more fundamental changes in point of view we can 
reduce these ten campaigns or periods of literary activity 
to three, as he himself has done elsewhere : first, his 
'prentice years on the " Globe " and his career as a mili- 
tant romanticist (1824-1831) ; 2 secondly, the seventeen 
years of his contributions to the "Revue des Deux 
Mondes" and other periodicals, a somewhat neutral type 
of criticism, more comprehensive and sympathetic than 
judicial (1831-1848) ; thirdly, the work of his full crit- 
ical maturity beginning with the "Chateaubriand et 
son Groupe litteraire " and marked by a simpler style 

1 Portraits lit, n, 526. 

* Some would extend his career of militant romanticism to about 1834. 



98 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

and more judicial attitude (1848-1869). The six vol- 
umes of " Port-Royal," which occupied him for more 
than twenty years, were begun in the second manner and 
finished in the third. 

I 

Perhaps these different stages in Sainte-Beuve' s critical 
development may best be studied in their relation to cer- 
tain large movements. We can follow in his work more 
interestingly perhaps than anywhere else, the interplay 
and conflict of the main intellectual currents of the 
nineteenth century. Those, indeed, who have written 
about Sainte-Beuve have often inclined to treat him from 
a point of view narrowly biographical, to seek to account 
on personal and often pettily personal grounds for his 
critical opinions. They have taken very much to heart 
his own advice to " eschew the academic bust " and to 
look on the seamy as well as on the right side of the tap- 
estry. In this sense one may say he has been made the 
victim of his own method. But even Sainte-Beuve' s af- 
fair with Hugo's wife, which has been such a delectable 
morsel for the ultra-biographical school, may be profit- 
ably subordinated to the larger question of his whole re- 
lationship to the romantic movement. 

Adopting, then, the more intellectual, and I believe 
also the more equitable, method of approach, we have to 
consider first of all as reflected in the writings of Sainte- 
Beuve the great main struggle of the nineteenth century 
— that between tradition on the one hand, and the forces 
that may be summed up under the name of naturalism 
on the other. Now tradition is at least twofold. The 



SAINTE-BEUVE 99 

term covers what Nisard would call la double antiquite, 
that is, both religious or Christian tradition and that 
classical or humanistic discipline which is often in 
accord, but also, at times, at war with Christianity. Nat- 
uralism, again, has its intellectual or analytical as well 
as its emotional aspects. These two main aspects of the 
movement reduce themselves virtually in the nineteenth 
century to science and Rousseauistic romanticism. We 
should add, however, that Sainte-Beuve was familiar, 
not merely through books, but by contact with its 
surviving representatives, with the older forms of the 
naturalistic revolt against tradition — that is, with both 
the sentimentalism and rationalism of the eighteenth 
century. He was intimate, for example, with his fellow- 
townsman, Daunou, who was at once an accomplished 
classicist and a thorough-going ideologist — terms that 
Taine confounds but that Sainte-Beuve is careful to keep 
separate. 1 He found in Daunou, as he tells us, the living 
embodiment of the older French literary tradition and 
at the same time was initiated by him into " the most 
advanced eighteenth century," which meant in practice 
into a very advanced form of philosophic materialism. 
He also came in contact with Fauriel in whom, as we 
have seen, we can trace the process by which the eight- 
eenth-century point of view passes over into that of 
the nineteenth century. Fauriel's passion for origins 
assumes in Sainte-Beuve the form of interest in the 
origins or youth of the individual — "that ineffable 
moment," as he says, "from which everything dates." 2 

1 See article on Daunou in Portraits cont., rv. * N. Lundis, m, 25. 



100 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Sainte-Beuve was also initiated into the older social 
as well as the older literary tradition. We think of him 
during the last twenty years of his lif e as somewhat of 
a recluse, but before 1848 he frequented the best so- 
ciety of the time — the men and women who were in the 
true, as well as in the conventional, sense aristocratic. 
The Comte d'Haussonville who belonged to this society in- 
sinuates that Sainte-Beuve was himself no "gentleman." * 
It is of course true that in his origins and personal 
appearance as well as in many of his instincts Sainte- 
Beuve was intensely bourgeois. This is, no doubt, the 
sense of the legend that associates all the great advent- 
ures of his life with an umbrella. Thus we are told that 
throughout his pistol duel in the rain with M. Dubois, he 
insisted on holding up an umbrella, giving as his reason 
that he was resigned to being killed but not to catching 
cold. Still he acquired in the drawing-room of Madame 
Recamier and elsewhere a feeling for the graces and 
amenities of aristocratic society, for its urbanity and tact 
and measure, — all the old-world charm that has scarcely 
survived the rude contact with democracy. Indeed, 
through all of his middle period Sainte-Beuve had too 
much in mind as his ideal audience the women of these 
very refined circles, with the inevitable result that he 
inclined to preciosite. He admits that at this time he 
had become somewhat of a mannerist, or, in his own 
words, had got into the habit of " caressing and over- 
refining his thought." He thanks " necessity, that great 

1 Probably the least gentlemanly thing Sainte-Beuve ever did was to 
publish privately the Livre d ) Amour in 1843. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 101 

muse which, at supreme moments, makes the dumb man 
speak and the stammerer articulate plainly," for hav- 
ing forced him to address a wider public, " to speak to 
everybody in the language of all." l 

To the kind of knowledge that comes from living 
contact with literary and social tradition, Sainte-Beuve 
added the knowledge that may be gained by study. 
From his school-days he had been an excellent Latinist 
and kept adding throughout his life to his knowledge 
of Greek. Even during the last crowded years he found 
time to take lessons from a native Greek, M. Pantasides, 
and to read through with him several times the " Iliad " 
and " Odyssey." " Immortal spirits of Rome and espe- 
cially of Greece," he exclaims, "fortunate geniuses who 
have culled as though in a first harvest all the bloom 
and simple grace and natural grandeur of man, you in 
whom thought, wearied by modern civilization and our 
complex life, once more finds youth and strength, 
health and freshness, and all the unsophisticated treas- 
ures of manly maturity and heroic youth, great men, 
for us like gods and whom so few get close to and con- 
template, do not disdain this study in which I receive 
you on festal occasions; doubtless others possess you 
more fully and interpret you more worthily ; you are 
better known elsewhere, but nowhere are you more 
deeply loved." 2 

n 

Sainte-Beuve's relation to Christian tradition and to 
religion in general is a delicate and important matter. 

1 Portraits lit, in, 550. a p^ contf v , 467. 



102 MODEEN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Here again he had the advantage of coming into con- 
tact with men who were living incarnations of Christ- 
ianity, in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. For 
an initiation into the spirit of Protestantism and to 
some extent of Jansenism he was under a deep debt to 
the writings and personality of Alexandre Vinet. But 
before discussing further Sainte-Beuve's attitude towards 
Christianity or his capacity for definite belief at all, we 
may best quote his own account (written late in life) of 
the phases through which he passed in his early man- 
hood : " No mind is more pliant than mine or more 
thoroughly broken in to every form of metamorphosis. 
I began frankly and crudely with the most advanced 
eighteenth century, with Tracy, Daunou, Lamarck, and 
physiology: that is my true substance. From there I 
passed through the doctrinaire and psychological school 
of the ' Globe/ but making my reservations and without 
becoming a follower. Thence I passed over to poetical 
romanticism and through the society of Victor Hugo, and 
seemed to melt into it. I traversed afterwards, or rather 
skirted, Saint-Simonism and almost immediately after- 
ward the society of Lamennais, still very Catholic. In 
1837 at Lausanne I skirted Calvinism and Methodism, 
and had to try to interest this community. In all these 
journeyings of the spirit I never abdicated my will and 
judgment save for a moment in the society of Hugo 
and by a sort of spell. I never pledged my belief, but 
I understood things and people so perfectly that I raised 
the greatest hopes in true believers who wished to con- 
vert me and believed me already one of them. My curi- 



SAINTE-BEUVE 103 

osity, my desire to see everything, to look on every- 
thing at close quarters, my extreme pleasure at finding 
the relative truth of everything, involved me in this 
series of experiments, which have been for me only a 
long course in moral physiology.* ' x 

Though Sainte-Beuve came to feel at a comparatively 
early period that it was his destiny " to be and remain 
outside of everything," 2 he was not, I believe, as re- 
signed to this lack of centre in his life as one might 
infer from this passage. Evidence on this point may be 
gathered from the letters he wrote for many years to the 
Abbe Eustache Barbe, who, before entering the priest- 
hood, had been one of his fellow students at the Bleriot 
Institute at Boulogne. The two youths had been wont to 
take long strolls together on the seashore and their talk, 
as Sainte-Beuve tells us, ran ordinarily on the most seri- 
ous subjects and the eternal problems. The correspond- 
ence is continued in somewhat the same tone. " I suffer," 
he writes to Barbe, " from the absence of faith; of fixed 
purpose and pole ; I have the sentiment of these things, 
but I lack the things themselves." 3 Later he adds, "My 
life is governed very much by chance ; the flood is driv- 
ing me on and my ship has no anchor." 4 Still later he 
tells Barbe that he escapes from eating his heart out 
only "by plunging up to his neck in study." "I am 
revealing to you the true secret of my condition." 5 
" Work which is my great burden is also my great re- 
source," 6 he writes in one of his last letters to Barbe. 

1 Port, lit., in, 545. 2 Letter to Leiininier, 7 April, 1833. 

8 Nouvelle Cor., 41 (1836). 4 Nouvelle Cor., 93 (1844). 

5 Ibid., 110 (1846). • Ibid., 182 (1863). 



104 MODERN FEENCH CRITICISM 

His confession to the Protestant Vinet coincides closely 
with that to the Catholic Barbe. " I have passed into 
the state of a pure critical intelligence," he writes to 
him, a and look with saddened eye on the death of my 
heart." Later in the same letter he compares his intelli- 
gence to a " dead moon that bathes in its cold rays the 
cemetery of his heart." ' In one of his detached thoughts 
he likens his soul, in a metaphor that seems to have 
suggested Arnold's " Dover Beach," to a sandy waste 
of shore from which the sea of faith has long since 
withdrawn. 2 

So much for serious Christianity in Sainte-Beuve. 
He lacked faith and a rule of life, but he adds, we must 
remember, that he had the sentiment of these things. 
In other words, although he was never really religious, 
he did pass through a spell of romantic religiosity. " I 
have followed in my return to religion," he writes to 
Barbe in 1830, " less the pathway of theology or even 
philosophy than that of art and poetry." In so far 
Sainte-Beuve is evidently a follower of Chateaubriand's. 
He is not, however, like Chateaubriand moved so much 
by the external poetry of Christianity, the aesthetic and 
imaginative charm of its rites and ceremonies, as by the 
poetry of its inner life. He defines Chateaubriand as an 
epicurean with a Catholic imagination. He might have 
defined himself, at least for a number of years, as an 
epicurean with a Jansenist sensibility. He repels Beran- 
ger's charge that he inclined " too much to religiosity, 
the mania of our epoch, and the very opposite, as I be- 

1 Cor., i, 130, a Port, lit., m, 540. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 105 

lieve, of religion." ! Yet in a sense Beranger was right ; 
it was in this mood that Sainte-Beuve composed the 
earlier part of "Port-Koyal "5 as the mood passed away, 
he came to regard the subject with cold detachment, as he 
himself tells us, or, as one of his secretaries maintains, 
with positive dislike. 2 

Even more questionable forms of religiosity appear in 
Sainte-Beuve. He speaks of " the six celestial months " 
(the six months of his affair with Madame Hugo), during 
which he composed his volume of religious verse, " Les 
Consolations." " My imagination," he says, speaking of his 
novel " Volupte," which was written about the same time, 
"has always been in the service of my sensibility. To write 
a novel is merely my way of being in love and saying so." 
Unfortunately, he might have made the same remark 
with equal truth of his religious poetry. It is an inex- 
tricable mixture of love and religion, the religion being 
so used as to throw a glamour over the earthly passion. 
This is what I have called elsewhere 3 pseudo-Platonism, 
and what in this case might be termed with equal pro- 
priety pseudo-Christianity. The spell upon Sainte-Beuve 
at this period, which led him to abdicate his will and 
become an active and militant romanticist, was not 
merely that of Madame Hugo, but, at the outset espe- 
cially, that of Hugo as well. Sainte-Beuve was not one 
of those stern and masculine natures that have their 
centre in themselves. He was not, if we may borrow a 
phrase from the journal of the Goncourts, who are in 

1 Port-Royal, I, 550. 2 Sainte-Beuve, par Jules Levallois, 177. 

8 The New Laokoon, ch. v. 



106 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

general among his least intelligent critics, a superior 
male {un rable super ieur). He was richest naturally in 
the feminine virtues of comprehension and sympathy, 
and instinctively sought to attach himself to some cause 
or personality that should give him the sense of direc- 
tion which he did not find in himself. He was an " Elisha 
always in quest of his Elijah.' ' And so he attached him- 
self for a time to Hugo, just as he was on the point of 
attaching himself a little later to Lamennais and others. 
It was a time when many tempting baits were set (new 
humanitarian religions and the like) for the intellectually 
unwary. But, though in Sainte-Beuve's own metaphor in 
regard to these new movements, he often nibbled at the 
cheese, he did not get caught in the trap. He did, how- 
ever, as I have already said, carry on his quest with more 
real ardor and less as a cold-blooded experiment than 
would appear from his later accounts. His motto might 
have been : " Enthusiasm and repentance." Nor is his 
failure to fix himself to be ascribed entirely to his own 
instability ; his successive disillusions in his search for an 
ideal were due in large measure to the fact that he was 
living in an age of pseudo-idealism, and that he had 
encountered so many pseudo-idealists. "If my readers 
of recent years," he says, " have noticed in me senti- 
ments of distrust and habitual skepticism, they will 
never know what I have secretly had to suffer for hav- 
ing at the outset carried all my sincerity and tender- 
ness of spirit into my political and literary relations." 1 
What he saw on every hand was self-seeking that dis- 

1 Port. Cont., in, 49. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 107 

guised itself under rose-colored clouds of fine senti- 
ments. There was Cousin, the apostle of the true, the 
good, and the beautiful, who nevertheless put no se- 
rious check on his own instincts of domination ; Ville- 
main, so great a talent and so accomplished a wit, 
always professing generous, liberal, philanthropic, Christ- 
ian sentiments, and yet "the most sordid soul, the 
most mischievous ape alive " ; * Hugo, in whom he had 
found only " the immense pride and infinite egoism of 
an existence that knows only itself " ; 2 Balzac, whom 
he had seen " exuding the intoxication with himself from 
every pore " ; 3 Chateaubriand, who posed part of the day 
as the author of the "Genius of Christianity" and then 
devoted the rest of the day to playing the elderly Don 
Juan. 4 No wonder he made it an essential side of his 
method to "eschew the academic bust," and to suspect 
that under the fairest semblances and the finest dra- 
peries assumed by the men of his time there was some- 
thing hollow. 

He had come to feel, after having been at least half 
a disciple of Lamennais, that even this leader was but 
a pseudo-idealist ; that he was not a man with a rule of 
life, but a creature of impulse. Lamennais had shifted 
abruptly from one extreme point of view to another, 
" leapfrogging," as Sainte-Beuve puts it, over the heads 
of his moderate friends. " Know," he says to Lamennais 
(and it is easy to detect the plaintive personal note), 
" know that nothing is worse than to invite souls to 

1 Cor. i, 316. a Nouvelle Cor., 34. 

8 Port-Royal, I, 552. 4 Lundis, n, 158. 



108 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

believe and then to decamp without any warning and 
desert them. Nothing so inclines them to that skepti- 
cism which you still abhor although you no longer have 
anything definite to oppose to it. How many souls that 
were already learning to hope, souls whom you had 
got into your hold and were carrying with you in your 
pilgrim's wallet, are, now that the wallet has been cast 
away, left lying prostrate at the ditch-side." Of his 
eminent contemporaries in general, Sainte-Beuve said 
he "knew most of them too well for his own enthu- 
siasm." " Having approached almost all of them from 
the point of view of admiration and praise I quickly 
went to the bottom and know unluckily the whole 
story of their secret vanity." * " I thought," he says, 
" when I entered Hugo's house that I was in the grot 
of a demi-god, but I found myself in the den of the 
Cyclops." 2 His own role in this house had been, as he 
puts it, to "throw a gauze over epicureanism," with 
a view to seducing a friend's wife ; in other words, in a 
pseudo-idealistic age he had himself been a pseudo- 
idealist. 

The study of the austere Port-Royalists, he tells us, 
had never taught him to rise superior to his own self- 
love. 3 This self-love had been wounded cruelly, espe- 
cially perhaps by the comparative failure of his creative 
efforts in verse, above all of the "Pensees d'Aout" 
(1837). And so he gradually comes round to the point 
of view of a writer who had also suffered severe youthful 

i Nouvelle Cor. t 42. 3 Sainte-Beuve, par L. S6ch4, n, 65. 

8 Port-Royal, VI, 245. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 109 

disillusions — La Rochefoucauld. Like him, he inclines 
more and more to see in life, even in its most specious 
aspects, a universal triumph of the principle of self-love. 
After the shipwreck of the vessel freighted with his 
romantic hopes and aspirations, he resigned himself to 
take refuge on the raft of criticism, 1 and perfect himself, 
like La Rochefoucauld, in such wisdom as may lie in 
disenchantment. This break with his past is marked 
by the publication of the article on La Rochefoucauld 
in 1840, though the fading away of the romantic 
glamour had been fairly complete two or three years 
earlier. " This article on La Rochefoucauld/ ' he writes 
in the last year of his life, "(if I may be allowed to 
call attention to the fact,) marks an important moment, 
a decisive date in my intellectual life. My early youth, 
from the moment I had begun ttf reflect, had been 
entirely devoted to philosophy and to a positivist philo- 
sophy in agreement with the studies of physiology and 
medicine for which I was preparing myself. But a grave 
moral affection, a great disorder of sensibility, had inter- 
vened about 1829, and had produced a real deviation in 
my ideas. My volume of verse, ' Les Consolations,' and 
other works that followed, notably ' Volupte ' and the 
first volumes of ' Port-Royal/ bear sufficient witness to 
this restless and overwrought mood, which carried with 
it a considerable portion of mysticism. The study of 
La Rochefoucauld . . . marks the end of this crisis and 
the return of sounder views, in which years and reflec- 
tion have only strengthened me." 2 It is, indeed, as we 

1 Port. ConL, H, 486. 8 Portraits de Femmes, 321. 



110 MODEKN FRENCH CKITICISM 

*\ . shall see still more clearly later, an essential part of 

Sainte-Beuve' s method to trace out human self-love in 
all its myriad disguises. In his last article on La Roche- 
foucauld (1863), Sainte-Beuve speaks of the "subtil- 
ized and quintessentiated ego " he often detects even in 
utterances and points of view that seem most sublime 
and impersonal. Man, the everlasting prisoner of his 
self-love, " cuts and carves everything he encounters on 
his own pattern." He continues : " And I myself, first 
of all, I, who am writing this, if I force myself to love 
what I am not, or even the contrary of what I am, do it 
not through detachment from the ego ; it is perhaps be- 
cause I take pride in being nothing in particular, and 
like myself better apparently under this broken, fugitive 
and multiple form, than under any other. No, no, honest 
folk, La Rochefoucauld, rightly understood, is not so 
easy to refute as you suppose." 1 

Closely associated with his cult for La Rochefoucauld 
is his cult for La Bruyere, whose view of life coincides 
in so many ways with that of La Rochefoucauld, and 
who appealed to Sainte-Beuve furthermore by his con- 
summate art in literary portrait-painting, or, as one 
might say, in the literary miniature. He remarks on the 
Countess of Albany's copy of La Bruyere with her 
marginal notes : " How I should like to have that copy 
before me and make a close study of it. Every sincere 
heart, every sincere intellect might thus jot down all 
his moral life on the margins of his La Bruyere. He 
has given the text, you have only to add the variants." 2 

1 N. Lundis, v, 391. 2 N. Lundis, v, 427. 






SAINTE-BEUVE 111 

Elsewhere he advises us to have a copy of La Bruyere 
on the table at our bedside. Take a little of it at a time 
and frequently and he promises that the health of our 
minds will profit by the prescription. 1 

Both La Kochef oucauld and La Bruyere, it has been 
remarked, have a view of human nature very similar to 
that of Christianity, but with very little of the Christ- 
ian hope. Pascal would have said that they had a 
right sense of man's wretchedness without grace, but an 
insufficient sense of the grandeur man may attain with 
•the help of grace. Sainte-Beuve is entirely at one with 
La Kochefoucauld and La Bruyere in this respect. He 
can at least admire the Jansenists for their inexorable 
dealings with the ordinary facts of human nature. " Let 
those who cannot accept the remedies proposed by these 
mournful believers," he says of them, " respect them at 
least and pity them as fellow creatures for having felt 
so deeply on certain days the nothingness and wretch- 
edness of human nature, that ocean of vices and pains, 
and its murmur, its fury, its eternal plaint." 2 

Sainte-Beuve remained to the end a "melancholy 
skeptic who is not sure of his own doubt." But from 
the outset he had been temperamentally with the natur- 
alists rather than with the supernaturalists, and the 
naturalistic temper grew upon him. We are often re- 
minded, by the forms it assumes, of the whole class of 
doubters known in the seventeenth century as the liber- 
tins. We can discover in Sainte-Beuve a direct relation- 
ship to several of these liber tins besides La Rochefou- 

* Lundis, n, 66. a Port-Royal, n, 115. 



112 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

cauld. Pascal had noted this secession from Christianity 
in the name of nature, and in some of the most pene- 
trating pages that have been written by any modern 
man he connects this naturalism with the naturalism of 
classical antiquity. Those moderns, he says, who try to 
live purely according to nature without the inner bal- 
ance wheel of faith, fall inevitably, like all ancient nat- 
uralists, either into the extreme of stoic pride or into 
that of epicurean relaxation. He takes Montaigne as a 
type of the epicurean skeptic and in this sense the greatest 
of the libertins. Sainte-Beuve accepts substantially this 
conception of Montaigne in several of the most brilliant, 
though not perhaps soundest chapters of his " Port- 
Royal" (chapters written while he was still cultivating a 
Jansenist sensibility). We should associate with these 
chapters what he said towards the end of his life : " I 
have reached the same age as Bayle, Horace and Mon- 
taigne, my masters. I may die." 1 It is essential for a 
proper understanding of Sainte-Beuve to determine his 
relation to these three men, and first of all to Montaigne. 

in 

In his treatment of Montaigne Sainte-Beuve has not 
altogether avoided, I believe, a rather common error 
during the past century — that of confusing the planes 
of being. Three such planes may be distinguished — 
the religious, the humanistic, the naturalistic — though 
there are, of course, numerous intermediary stages, the 
rounds of the ladder, as it were, by which man may 

1 Lundis, xvi, 45. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 113 

mount or descend from one level to another of his being. 
On which of these planes does Montaigne live? We 
must grant Sainte-Beuve at once that he is not at home 
on the religious level. His view of life is not in the high- 
est degree heroic, it is certainly not saintly. Like Sainte- 
Beuve himself, Montaigne idealizes youth. The tempera- 
mental bent is already visible at twenty, and Montaigne 
is loath to believe that this bent can be traversed and 
a new direction given a man by some miracle of grace 
or conversion. Montaigne, says Sainte-Beuve, has "no 
notion of that inverse moral and spiritual perfection, 
that growing maturity of the inner being under the 
withering outer envelope, that perpetual education for 
heaven, that second birth and immortal youth, . . . 
which makes the white-haired old man seem at times 
only in his first bloom for the eternal springtime ; an 
illusion perhaps, and a last Utopia, but of the kind a 
Franklin himself cherished." 1 

If Montaigne is not at home on the religious level of 
human nature, we must grant Sainte-Beuve that he is 
very much at home on the naturalistic level. He has the 
expansiveness of the naturalist, his far-ranging intellect- 
ual and emotional curiosity, above all he has the natur- 
alistic sense of flux and instability, the sense of all that 
is undulating and fugitive, and the closely-allied sense 
of infinite shades of difference even in things that seem 
identical. " Distinguo" he declares, " is the most uni- 
versal member of my logic." In these as in many other 
respects he is an epicurean naturalist, and Sainte-Beuve 
is no less plainly his disciple. 

1 Port-Royal, u, 430. 



114 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

But what about the intermediary or humanistic level 
in Montaigne ? One becomes humanistic in proportion 
as he grows aware of that law of order and measure 
and decorum that, according to Cicero, distinguishes 
man from other living creatures, and in proportion as 
he imposes the discipline of this law upon his ordinary 
or animal self ; in proportion, that is, as he aims not 
merely to express his own idiosyncrasy, but to be a nor- 
mal man. Now this humane preoccupation, so far from 
being absent from the work of Montaigne, is, I believe, 
at the very heart of it. Montaigne, says Sainte-Beuve, 
is pure nature. His ambition at all events was to be 
pure human nature. The vagabondage and egotism are 
more or less superficial. What we find under the sur- 
face is a fairly firm conviction based on the Greek, and 
especially the Latin, classics, as to what the true man 
should be ; a conception which in the somewhat conven- 
tionalized form of the honnete homme qui ne se jrique 
de rien — the gentleman and scholar who in the inter- 
est of his all-roundness is afraid of knowing any one 
thing too well — was to dominate the whole neo-classical 
period. Emerson puts us on the right track when he 
remarks that Montaigne rises to passion only when speak- 
ing of Socrates, and relates how in the cemetery of 
Pere Lachaise, at Paris, he came upon the tomb of an 
Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, and who, accord- 
ing to the inscription, " lived to do right and had formed 
himself to virtue on the essays of Montaigne." 

Montaigne is misleading because unlike most people 
he affects not more but less certainty than he feels. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 115 

He obeys in part a humanistic motive in his very skep- 
ticism, which is a salutary protest against the " horrible 
mania of certainty " that had possessed the theological 
ages, and was still afflicting his own time. 

In making of Montaigne a pure naturalist, Sainte- 
Beuve has fallen in too far with the tactics of Pascal 
and the Jansenists, who are for obliterating all the in- 
termediary stages of purely human effort and virtue by 
which man may rise above the naturalistic level ; who 
are, in short, for opposing a stark naturalism to a stark 
supernaturalism, so that man may have no resource save 
in their theological deus ex machina. That is why Jan- 
senism, we may remark in passing, is an impracticable 
view of life. Sainte-Beuve makes of Montaigne a direct 
ancestor of Rousseau. " The fair foliage of his essays," 
he says, " is later to become a dense and dark and ven- 
omous forest, deadly to the Werthers and other dream-^ 
ers who fall asleep in its shadow, ... a tortuous abode 
of suicides, etc." * So far as the main direction of Mon- 
taigne is concerned, this is not only untrue but the ex- 
act opposite of the truth. Montaigne is moving towards 
the centre of human nature ; the pure naturalists, 
whether sentimental or scientific, are moving away from 
the centre, no matter what pseudo-mystical devices they 
may employ to convince themselves and us of the con- 
trary. What is the inevitable upshot of Montaigne? asks 
Sainte-Beuve. " ' A little Jew, walking with measured 
tread,' 2 is going to tell us : ... A great gloomy heaven, 

1 Port-Royal, n, 405. 

2 " Un petit Juif marchant a pas compte's." Voltaire's description of 
Spinoza. 



116 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

a vast, revolving universe, dumb and unfathomable, in 
which from time to time and in certain spots life makes 
its appearance, ... in which man comes into being, 
glittering and dying with the thousand insects of the 
hour on this grassy islet floating in a marsh," etc. 
" All that is cheerful and flattering to the eye in Mon- 
taigne is merely there to curtain the abyss or, as he 
would have said, to turf the tomb." 1 

This is an eloquent assertion of the hopelessness and 
helplessness of a pure naturalism in dealing with ulti- 
mate problems. But so far as its relevancy to Montaigne 
is concerned, it is little more than rhetoric; it merely 
testifies to the success with which Sainte-Beuve during 
the time he was writing this part of " Port-Royal," had 
cultivated.a Jansenist sensibility. The humanist certainly 
falls short of the saint, but he is just as certainly superior 
to the pure naturalist, whether stoic or epicurean, to 
any one, in short, who would reduce human nature and 
phenomenal nature to a common law. 

rv 

The same point may, perhaps, be made even more 
clearly by comparing Sainte-Beuve with another of the 
three men whom he claims as masters — Horace. There 
is a side of Horace that is more obviously and grossly 
epicurean than anything in Sainte-Beuve. Save for a 
mere fraction of his work, Sainte-Beuve is, in this respect, 
at the opposite pole from writers like Herrick, who 
boasted, as Catullus and Martial and other poets had 

l Port-Royal, 4A2. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 117 

boasted before him, that though his muse was " jocund," 
his life was chaste. Yet in the final analysis Horace is 
more humanistic than Sainte-Beuve. He had been more 
deeply preoccupied with questions of conduct ever since 
his boyhood and those object lessons in morality he had 
received from his father. Through all his experimenting 
with stoical and epicurean tenets we can trace an ascend- 
ing effort, a gradual ripening and mellowing, until in 
the most amiable and undogmatic fashion, and simply 
by the exercise of a keen good sense, he comes to assert 
that discipline which the human self and its law of 
measure impose on the ordinary self. "Dare to be wise," 
is the sum of his message. " A right beginning is more 
than half of the whole. Despise pleasures and bridle and 
chain the mind. If you do not command it, it will com- 
mand you." 1 In one of his last poems he says that he is 
neglecting more and more the numbers and measures of 
Latin song for the numbers and measures of the true life. 
He is preoccupied, above all, with the problem whether 
he is becoming gentler and better with the progress of 

the years: 

" Lenior et melior fis accedente senecta ? " fl 

Beligion goes higher than this ; even the best poetry 
goes higher. Yet Horace's confidence in the power of 
the individual to perfect himself is plain. Let us quote 
by contrast a sentence of Sainte-Beuve : " Ripen ! Ripen ! 
as a man grows older, he rots in some places and hardens 
in others, but he does not ripen." 3 Sainte-Beuve's hu- 

1 Epist., i, 2, 40-62. 2 m dtt n>2 , 211. 

* Portraits cont., v, 461. 



118 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

manism is not, like Horace's, a discipline and a rule of 
life ; it is not active, erect, and militant, but has retired 
from the intellect and will to the sensibility, and so is 
more or less a matter of passive enjoyment. It bears 
about the same relation to genuine humanism that the 
aesthetic faith of Chateaubriand does to genuine Christ- 
ianity. To be a humanist, even in this restricted sense, 
that is, to be one of the most exquisite of literary epi- 
cureans, still remains a rare distinction. And, after all, 
the humanistic fagade to Sainte-Beuve's epicureanism 
is substantial compared to what we have seen in later 
writers — Walter Pater, for example. If Sainte-Beuve 
were defined as an aesthetic humanist, Pater would have 
to be defined at best as a humanistic aesthete. 

The lapse from the religious or humanistic to the 
naturalistic level of being is, in almost a literal sense, 
decadent. The Rousseauistic romanticist usually dissimu- 
lates this lapse under a veil of pseudo-idealism. Of the 
presence of this false illusion of decadence in Sainte- 
Beuve's poetry and in " Volupte " I have already said 
something. His own contention was that he was trying 
to introduce a humbler and more domestic note into 
French verse, in imitation of Wordsworth and Crabbe. 
But he has little in common with these poets, who are 
themselves, save for the choice of lowly subjects, almost 
at opposite poles. Sainte-Beuve's poetry, however, espe- 
cially " Joseph Delorme, " does have a place in the his- 
tory of the malady of the age, deriving as it does from 
Chateaubriand and pointing the way in its choice, not 
merely of the humble, but of the repulsive, subject to 



SAINTE-BEUVE 119 

Baudelaire. His muse, as he says, is not a brilliant 
odalisk, who dances with bared bosom, but a poor con- 
sumptive, devoted to the task of nursing an aged, 
blind and insane father. If at times she sings in order 
to charm away his delirious terror, she is interrupted in 
the midst of her song by a hacking cough. This con- 
sumptive muse would have inspired horror in Words- 
worth, but very properly took under her protection 
" Les Fleurs du Mai." "You are right in saying," wrote 
Sainte-Beuve to Baudelaire, " that my poetry had much 
in common with yours. I had tasted of the same bitter 
fruit, full of ashes in the end." * 

We not only find in Sainte-Beuve the false illusion 
of decadence, we also find in him — and this is far more 
important for our present purpose — its false disillusion. 
» Wisdom, for Sainte-Beuve, is not a positive insight, 
the final reward of the struggle for self-mastery, but 
something cold and negative. To make clear this con- 
ception of wisdom, we shall need to treat from the point 
of view of ideas the aspect of Sainte-Beuve' s life that 
has so often been treated from the point of view of gos- 
sip ; or rather we should apply his own method to him, 
and let him speak for himself in this matter. We should, 
so far as possible, dip the elements of our judgment of 
him, as he phrases it, "out of his own inkwell." " In my 
youth," he says, speaking in the person of Amaury (the 
hero of " Volupte"), " my philosophy came to me espe- 
cially through voluptuousness, through the use of plea- 
sures." Most philosophers, he goes on to say, do their 

1 Cor., i, 360 (1865). 



120 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

meditating in the plenitude of life and at the height of 
illusion. He, on the contrary, did his " in the pale light 
of the morrow that follows pleasures, in that weariness 
of which Lucretius speaks, and which reveals the bottom 
of things. I saw constantly the seamy side and the end of 
everything, the nothingness which I already felt and 
the foretaste of which is not without melancholy de- 
lights." His mind, when he did his observing, " was in 
a state of slightly icy limpidity, and with the minimum 
of illusion." * Sainte-Beuve asserted more than once in 
his own name this strange doctrine that the truest 
vision of life is to be had " in the cold gray dawn of the 
morning after." " I have had my weaknesses," he writes 
magnificently, "the weaknesses that in King Solomon 
inspired disgust with everything and satiety of life." 2 
" Like Solomon and Epicurus," he says elsewhere, " I 
have penetrated into philosophy through pleasure. That 
is better than to reach it through logic like Hegel or 
Spinoza." 3 If philosophy is to be attained in this way, 
it must coincide with a general lack of convictions, for, 
as Sainte-Beuve remarks elsewhere, voluptuousness is 
a great dissolvent of the inner life. " The principle of 
certainty in us is undermined by it in the long run." 4 

The truth is, Sainte-Beuve' s emotional, like his intel- 
lectual, life was almost entirely unchecked and expansive. 
Now the master motive of a life that expands freely in 
this way is curiosity; and Sainte-Beuve's curiosity, both 

1 Lundis, xvi, 43. 

2 Cf. " II ressentait cet incurable degout de toutes choses qui est parti- 
culier a ceux qui ont abuse* des sources de la vie." (Portraits Cont., v, 464.) 

8 Port. Zi*., in, 543. 4 Proudhon, 102. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 121 

intellectual and emotional, was enormous. There exists 
in most men, he says, a poet who dies young. 1 This poet 
never died completely in Sainte-Beuve, but appears to 
the end in his extremely metaphorical and at times even 
flowery style. On the other hand, we feel even during 
the most romantic period of his youth that there existed 
in him alongside the poet an insatiably curious critic. 
It is even truer, perhaps, that he is a critic in his poetry 
than that he is a poet in his criticism. "Did Conrad," 
he asks in one of his poems, " know Latin better than 
Jouy? Did he use up fewer pens than Suard? Did Doc- 
tor Guy Patin have more than ten thousand volumes?' 



'2 



The particular kind of curiosity that appears in this 
passage suggests the affinity between Sainte-Beuve and 
Bayle, the last in date of the three men he mentions as 
his masters. " It is incredible how much Bayle there is 
in Sainte-Beuve," 3 says M. Faguet. And Sainte-Beuve's 
kinship to Bayle is even more apparent than that to 
Horace and Montaigne. Bayle was converted in his 
youth from Protestantism to Catholicism and then back 

1 Port, lit, I, 415. 

2 See the whole poem Mes Livres (Joseph Delorme). A La Rime, per- 
haps the best of his poems, is at least semi-critical. Several of his hap- 
piest critical phrases are found in the poems, e.g. : — 

"Lamartine ignorant, qui ne Bait que eon Sme" 

and 

" Vigny, plus secret, 
Comme en sa tour dHvoire, avant midi, rentrait." 

(Both from the poetical epistle " A M. Villcmain") 
8 Politiques et moralistes, m, 208. 



122 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

again to Protestantism, and lost all his fire of faith in 
these changes of creed. He finally became a libertine, 
though only in the seventeenth-century sense, and not, 
like Sainte-Beuve, in the nineteenth-century sense as 
well. We should note, however, regarding his emotional 
curiosity (not to speak of the rumor that he made love 
to Madame Jurieu), the somewhat morbid predilection 
for certain kinds of anecdotes that is familiar to all read- 
ers of the Dictionary. Bayle's intellectual curiosity is at 
all events unbounded. " There are minds," says Sainte- 
Beuve, " the vocation of which is to know simply for 
the sake of knowing ; minds which the passion of Faust 
possesses, and which do not refer back their acquisitions 
and efforts to the supreme and perfect goal capable of 
rectifying them." * 

Sainte-Beuve was, like Bayle, insatiably curious even 
about the trivial (" Did Conrad use up fewer pens than 
Suard?"). Faguet says that Bayle must have gossiped 
over his evening meal with his housekeeper. He goes 
rather far, however, when he adds that his books, like 
those of Sainte-Beuve, frequently savor of the servants' 
hall and a bit of the pantry. 2 Like Bayle, Sainte-Beuve 
is more likely to fall into the gossipy and familiar vein 
in his notes than in his main text (as he says, one feels 
more at home on the ground floor than in the grand 
apartments upstairs). Like Bayle, too, he has a way of 
insinuating into his notes some of his boldest statements, 
and like Bayle's, his method, especially before 1848, is 
at times feline and perfidious. He undermines by subtle 
1 Port-Royal, n, 160. * XVIlRSikcle, 23. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 123 

indirections what he is appearing to praise. " God save 
me from being eulogized by you," said one of the Gon- 
courts to him at a Magny dinner. 

We are dwelling, however, on the smaller side of the 
likeness between the two men. What Bayle stands for 
in the history of thought is the idea of tolerance, and 
it is on this side, after all, that we are to seek for the 
important relationship between him and Sainte-Beuve. 
No Frenchman of the nineteenth century was more 
afraid than Sainte-Beuve of that narrowing of the 
mind that comes from preconceived ideas or party 
spirit. "To the deuce with all fetishes," he said, "of 
whatever wood they are manufactured." Sainte-Beuve 
was in this respect a true disciple of Bayle and not like 
so many of his followers in the eighteenth century and 
since, who have managed to be fanatical in their very 
preaching of tolerance. Sainte-Beuve relates how one 
day M. Franck of the College de France was giving an 
address on tolerance. Some one present ventured to 
show disagreement, whereupon he was slapped by the 
person seated next to him, and finally thrown out of 
the hall by an audience that had grown enthusiastic 
over tolerance ! 1 Sainte-Beuve adds that intolerance is 
the French fault par excellence, and this is, of course, 
due to the tendency of the Frenchman to carry to an 
excess his virtue of logicality, and then to put emo- 
tion into the service of his logic. Sainte-Beuve was 
acutely conscious of the difference between the work- 
ings of his own mind in this respect and that of most 
1 N. Lundis, ix, 197. 



124 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Frenchmen. He deals with life and literature with a 
maximum of good sense and a minimum of mere logical 
exclusiveness, and this is of course a trait that appeals 
strongly to the English and American reader. The stu- 
dent of heredity might attach some weight to the fact 
that he had English blood. 

We must, however, show care in defining the par- 
ticular type of tolerance displayed by Sainte-Beuve and 
Bayle. The highest type, as Sainte-Beuve himself says, 
is the tolerance that is allied, not with the contempt for 
everything, but with a profound faith in something. 1 
The tolerance of Sainte-Beuve and Bayle can scarcely 
be said to be of this latter type, but rather of the skep- 
tical and epicurean variety that is so widespread in the 
world to-day. They enter with an admirable breadth of 
comprehensive sympathy into all the modes of being, 
but when it comes to drawing conclusions are pure 
Pyrrhonists. " Who am I," says Sainte-Beuve, " to de- 
cide in the name of absolute truth ? " 2 He sets aside 
every preference of his own and merely tries to estab- 
lish the two extreme poles without inclining in favor of 
either, and thus to give to thought its full and free 
play. 3 The only role that befits him, he says again, " is 
to balance over against one another the diverse and 
changing aspects of incomprehensible reality." 4 

Sainte-Beuve took this somewhat neutral view of criti- 
cism more particularly in what I have termed his middle 
period. From this point of view, the article he wrote 

1 N. Lundis, ix, 199. a Port-Royal, in, 409. 

• Port-Royal, n, 165. * Ibid., in, 423. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 125 

in 1835 on " Bayle and the Critical Spirit " is almost 
autobiographical. The extent to which he reduced the 
critic's role at this time to mere comprehension and sym- 
pathy may also be seen in a " thought " like the following : 
" The critical spirit is by nature facile, insinuating, mo- 
bile and comprehensive. It is a great and limpid stream 
which winds and bends its way about the works and 
monuments of poetry, as about so many rocks, fortresses, 
vine-clad hills and leafy valleys that border its shores. 
While each one of these objects remains fixed in the 
landscape and cares little for the other, while the feudal 
tower disdains the valley, and the valley knows nothing 
of the hillside, the stream goes from one to the other, 
bathes them without doing them violence, embraces them 
in its living waters, comprehends them, reflects them, and 
when the traveller is curious to know and visit these varied 
spots, it takes him in a boat, carries him smoothly along, 
and unfolds to him in succession all the changing spec- 
tacle of its course." 1 M. Lemaitre took this passage as 
motto for his impressionistic " Contemporains." Per- 
haps it fits the dilettante 2 even more than the impres- 
sionist, for the impressionist, in lieu of fixed principles, 
has at least sharp temperamental exclusions, whereas the 
critic, as Sainte-Beuve defines him at this time, neither 
excludes nor concludes. The critic is a sort of gypsy 
or vagrant in the intellectual world, without settled abode 
of his own, that is, without any central and dominating 
point of view ; or to use another of Sainte-Beuve's com- 

1 Joseph Delorme, Pense*e xvn. Cf. also Portraits Cont., n, 512. 
3 As the term is defined in the chapter on Kenan (p. 279). 



126 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

parisons, is like an actor who assumes every evening a 
new role. 

This conception of the critic could scarcely satisfy 
Sainte-Beuve permanently, nor could he fail to feel 
the differences as well as the similarities between Bayle 
and himself. Bayle' s curiosity is not only omnivorous, 
but indiscriminate. He gives, as has been pointed out, 
ten times more space in his " Dictionary " to D'Assoucy 
than to Dante. Aristotle or Peckins, as M. Faguet puts 
it, is all the same to him. His attitude towards the liter- 
ature of his own time is essentially journalistic. " The 
last book I see," he writes, " is the one I prefer to all 
others." He is equally interested, for example, in the 
"Phedre" of Racine and that of Pradon. 1 Now Sainte- 
Beuve was not only literary to his finger-tips, but as he 
got away from the special atmosphere of the romantic 
movement, he became more and more classical. One may 
say, indeed, that with increasing age his hold upon the 
Christian tradition lessened and that upon the human- 
istic tradition grew stronger. Furthermore, as he ma- 
tured and got more confidence in himself, he felt it was 
not enough for the critic to be comprehensive and sym- 
pathetic, he must also be judicial. "I have played the 
part of an advocate long enough," he exclaims, "let 
me now play that of judge." 2 As a result of thus feeling 
the need of being more judicial at the same time that 
he was becoming more classical in temper, he was led 
to honor Boileau, a critic who was in the highest de- 
gree judicial along traditional lines, and almost at the 
1 Port, lit., i, 382. * * Ibid., ni, 550. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 127 

opposite pole of criticism to Bayle. He had always, he 
tells us, lived in imagination with Boileau, but in his 
attitude towards him he went through several phases. 
There is first the brisk romantic attack of 1829, 1 then the 
partial palinode of 1843, 2 and finally the full tribute of 
admiration and praise in the article of 1852. 3 

We may also trace in Sainte-Beuve an interesting 
relationship to Goethe. Some of his earlier references 
are very superficial, as, for example, when he contrasts 
the spiritual elevation of Pascal with the lack of it in 
Goethe and Talleyrand ! 4 Later he makes ample repara- 
tion. He pronounces Goethe the greatest of critics, 5 and 
when he is looking for a high critical impartiality to 
oppose to the excess of partisanship he found in his 
French contemporaries, he thinks of Goethe even more 
than of Bayle. " immense lake, vast and calm mir- 
ror of Goethe, where art thou?" 6 he exclaims. Sainte- 
Beuve was himself in this respect the most Goethean of 
Frenchmen. When an admiring correspondent compared 
him to Goethe, however, he replied : " He naturally lived 
.on the summits, whereas I have been a dweller in the 
valley." 7 The difference is really even more funda- 
mental. The final impression one carries away from 
Sainte-Beuve is that of a man who has suffered an inner 
defeat ; from Goethe, that of a man who has fought and 
conquered. Sainte-Beuve, during his later period, was 
at all events very much at one with Goethe in aiming to 

1 Pon. lit, I, 3 ff. 2 Ibid., 23 ff. 

8 Lundis, vi, 494 ff . 4 Port-Royal, hi, 356. 

6 Lundis, xi, 505. fl Lundis, XV, 368. 

7 Cor., n, 3. 



128 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

be both a humanist and a naturalist ; to unite the most 
comprehensive sympathy for the modern movement with 
the cult of literary tradition. 

Perhaps the best way to understand Sainte-Beuve's 
critical activity during his last twenty years is to study 
in him this interplay and at times conflict of naturalism 
and humanism. I have been trying in this chapter to 
relate him in his naturalism to the " libertines " of the 
seventeenth century and to the epicureans of all ages. 
But to grasp his critical method, it is needful to go more 
fully than hitherto into certain forms of naturalism that 
belong especially to the nineteenth century. 



VI 

SAINTE-BEUVE (AFTER 1848) 

In his loss of romantic illusions Sainte-Beuve antici- 
pated by only a few years the course of the century 
itself. The culmination of political romanticism in the 
Revolution of 1848 was followed by sudden and violent 
disenchantment. The fairest millennial visions had col- 
lapsed at the first contact with reality. The "idealists" 
had had an abrupt descent from the clouds, and lay 
bruised and bleeding upon the earth. What really goes 
with the naturalistic view of life is imperialism. Those 
who would set up as idealists and at the same time live 
on the naturalistic level simply hasten the triumph of 
the opposite cause to that they are preaching. Thus 
the men of '48 proclaimed an "evangelical" republic, 
and the paroxysm of hideous anarchy that ensued pre- 
pared the way for the coup d'etat of 1851, and the ad- 
vent of the densest materialism the world had seen since 
the Roman decadence. This is the true romantic irony 
— far more poignant than what usually goes by that 
name. Sainte-Beuve says that the example of Napoleon 
had done much to corrupt the nineteenth century and 
encourage the cult of mere force even in literature. But 
Napoleon himself is only the ironical reply of the Nature 
of Things to the Utopias of the French Revolution. It 
was scarcely due to Napoleon that Sainte-Beuve himself 



130 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

showed traces of the imperialistic temper, — an undue 
partiality at times for the prevailing faction. When 
any sweeping is going on, it is well, as the French say- 
ing has it, to be on the side of the broom handle. I be- 
lieve that there were more honorable motives for the 
promptness with which Sainte-Beuve accepted the Sec- 
ond Empire. Still it was unfortunate that in his article 
"Les Regrets," 1 he should have given even the appear- 
ance of insulting the vanquished and rejoicing over 
their discomfiture. 

I 

From the bankruptcy of romantic idealism most men 
of the mid-nineteenth century drew the inference that 
all idealism is vain. It was time, they reasoned, to cease 
dreaming and face the facts. Man himself they would 
treat as a fact, subject to the same laws as other phe- 
nomena. In striking contrast to the wreckage of romantic 
hopes that littered the earth was the structure of solid 
achievement that the scientists were gradually raising 
by patient submission to the facts. In science man might 
recover part of that faith in himself that had just been 
so seriously shaken. Now the age in taking this trend was 
in a sense following the* line of Sainte-Beuve's own de- 
velopment. He had also become a positivist in his own 
way. He had taken as his seal the English word Truth, 
by which he meant of course relative and contingent 
truth, the establishing of the facts. " If I had a motto," 
he said, "it would be the true, the true alone. And as 
for the good and the beautiful they might come off as 

1 Lundis, I, 397 ft. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 131 

best they could." 1 In his passion for authenticity, in 
his almost morbid fear of being duped, he would not 
only get at the truth, but as the French put it, at the 
true truth, which is sometimes very different from the 
mere truth. Though his attitude towards literature is 
not primarily scientific, he satisfied the strictest scientific 
standards in his scrupulosity as to facts. The graceful- 
ness of the superstructure in his essays is equalled by 
the solidity of the foundations. " You would have had 
to know Sainte-Beuve," says Scherer, "to realize the 
almost morbid importance that he attached to the spell- 
ing of a proper name, to a bit of information, to a date. 
He wished to see everything with his own eyes, to verify 
everything." 2 

On the purely naturalistic side, therefore, Sainte-Beuve 
felt very much at home in the new age. He saw a gen- 
eration of younger men coming up with Taine and Re- 
nan at their head, who were in many respects his own 
disciples and by whom he was influenced in turn. He 
did not seem, like Lamartine and others, a forlorn sur- 
vivor into an uncongenial epoch, but was stimulated to 
do some of his best work. Here again, however, we 
must make some important distinctions. It is difficult to 
make too many distinctions in writing of Sainte-Beuve. 
He remained the skeptic to the end, " holding no form 
of creed but contemplating all " ; convinced with Bayle, 
that the only hope is in a moderate and reasonable 
human nature, and at the same time that human nature 
never can be moderate and reasonable ; convinced above 

1 Cor., n, 41. * Etudes, rv, 107. 



132 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

all with La Rochefoucauld that human nature can never 
be disinterested. But man it would appear is an incur- 
ably religious animal. If deprived of other objects of 
worship he will fall to worshipping himself. And this is 
what those who were influenced by Bayle in the eight- 
eenth century actually did. This idolatry of humanity 
and its future progress is almost universal among our 
modern naturalists and separates them from those seven- 
teenth-century "libertines" with whom I have been 
comparing Sainte-Beuve. 

What was Sainte-Beuve's own attitude towards the 
idea of progress, and in general towards the great God- 
dess Humanity before whose image we are all prostrated 
so devoutly to-day? Here again we must distinguish. 
There are evidently two main classes of humanitarians, 
not to speak of the blendings of the two types, and the 
sub-varieties of each. First there are the humanitarians 
who believe that mankind as a whole is going to be 
regenerated by the triumph, in some manner or other, 
either evolutionary or revolutionary, of the principle of 
fraternity or social pity over self-love. In the second place 
there are the humanitarians who believe that mankind is 
to be regenerated through science. The disciple of La 
Rochefoucauld who had been unable to feel the religious 
hope in the salvation of the individual, was not likely to 
fall in with the hope of the sentimental humanitarian in 
the salvation of the race. I do not mean to accuse Sainte- 
Beuve of heartlessness. He speaks, indeed, as we have 
seen, of the " death " of his heart, and so far as the 
religious intuitions are concerned, I believe that this is 



SAINTE-BEUVE 133 

true. But though one of the most irritable, Sainte-Beuve 
was also one of the kindliest of men, — even more cap- 
able of sympathy perhaps for the poor and the humble 
than for men of his own class. " The heart of Joseph 
Delorme," we read in the Life prefixed to the Poems, 
" was divided between an unbounded love for the suffer- 
ing portion of humanity and an implacable hatred for 
the powerful of this world." Joseph Delorme, in short, 
embodied in himself both the rebellion and the social 
pity of the Rousseauist, and something of Delorme sur- 
vived in Sainte-Beuve to the end. Though unable to acqui- 
esce in the humanitarian creed he had a good deal of the 
humanitarian temper as appears in the volume he devoted 
to the agitator Proudhon. 

One who, like Sainte-Beuve, saw barbarism always trem- 
bling just beneath the surface of human nature, is at best, 
however, a doubtful recruit for either scientific or senti- 
mental humanitarians. " He who has not witnessed," he 
says, "an army of brave men in complete rout, or a 
political assembly that supposed itself sensible thrown 
into a frenzy by some passionate speech, does not know 
to what point it remains true that man at bottom is only 
an animal and a child. eternal childhood of the human 
heart!" 1 No wonder he looked doubtfully on man's at- 
tempt to set up his own image for worship in the sanc- 
tuary left vacant by la grande absence de Dieu. In the 
course of one of the finest tributes that have ever been 
paid to Moliere (the greatest of all the seventeenth cen- 
tury "libertines"), Sainte-Beuve writes that "to love 

1 Port, lit., hi, 549. 



134 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Moliere is to make sure of not falling into a smug and 
limitless admiration for a humanity that idolizes itself, 
and forgets of what stuff it is made and that it is al- 
ways, try as it may, only puny human nature." 1 Perhaps 
it is not well to become quite so expert as Sainte-Beuve 
in the art of detecting self-seeking. He comments as 
follows on one of the most disenchanted thoughts of 
Marcus Aurelius: "And so Marcus Aurelius drank his 
chalice, too, but he drank it in silence. He did not cry 
out like that cynical revolutionist : 2 ' I 've had my fill of 
men' (Je suis soul des hommes), but he thought it. 
Cicero too said it in his manner. This feeling of nausea 
at men often came upon him and there was a moment 
when everything appeared odious to him except death. 
Caesar towards the end no longer took the trouble to de- 
fend his life. He seemed to say: 'Let them take it, if 
they want it.' We arrive at this same feeling of disgust 
by all paths. It is enough to have lived a long time and 
to have had too close dealings with the human species." 
It is to be feared that any one who has come to feel in 
that way will not be able to profit by John Morley's 
advice and satisfy his religious sense by communing 
with Humanity in its past, present, and future. 

Yet, after all, Sainte-Beuve's nearest approach to a 
definite belief is his belief in scientific progress. " If we 
go beyond the ephemeral triflings," he says, "of present 
literature, which cumber up the front of the stage and 
obstruct one's gaze, there is in this age a great and 
powerful movement in every direction, in every science. 
1 N. Lundis, v, 278. a Danton. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 135 

Our nineteenth century in contradistinction to the eight- 
eenth is not dogmatic, it seems to avoid giving its opin- 
ion, it is in no haste to conclude. There are even little 
superficial reactions which it seems to favor by fearing 
to oppose them. But patience! At every point men are 
at work — in physics, chemistry, zoology, botany, in all 
branches of natural history, in historical and philosoph- 
ical criticism, in oriental studies, in archaeology, every- 
thing is being gradually transformed, and the day when 
the century takes the trouble to draw its conclusions, 
you will see that it is at a hundred leagues, a thousand 
leagues, from its point of departure. The vessel is in 
the open sea. The knots are reeled off without being 
counted. The day when men take their bearings they 
will be amazed at the distance they have covered." 1 
This sounds encouraging, though it does not tell us 
where we are going, but merely that we are on the way. 
Sainte-Beuve quotes with approval the saying of Pascal 
that " the inventions of men increase from age to age, 
but that the goodness and badness of the world remain 
in general the same," and adds that he should like to 
see this saying used as epigraph for all our grandiose 
theories of progress. 2 

I have already spoken of the interplay and conflict 
of the humanistic and naturalistic elements in Sainte- 
Beuve's later writing. It is perhaps the main form in 
him of the opposition between thought and feeling (for 
his humanism is largely a matter of feeling) that so 
permeates our modern period. One must of course not 

1 Port, lit., m, 549. 2 Port-Royal, n, 261. 



136 ■ MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

be over hasty in setting down as a contradiction what is 
one of Sainte-Beuve's most admirable traits — his readi- 
ness to observe impartially and record all the facts with- 
out attempting to reduce them to some premature system. 
Still the contradiction exists. If as a scientific natur- 
alist he believed in progress (with the serious reserva- 
tion we have just seen), as a humanist he believed in 
decadence. That is precisely the significance of the 
volume on Chateaubriand — the first in which he delib- 
erately sets out to be a judicial critic. He makes a hu- 
manistic survey of Chateaubriand and concludes that he 
is the first great writer of the decadence, the writer 
who transferred the capital of French prose from Rome 
to Byzantium. Like Voltaire or Nisard, he accepts the 
theory of the classic age and asserts that his own time 
is already on the descending curve. " I believe to my 
great regret," he says, "(and I held out against the be- 
lief as long as I could) that literature is on the highroad 
to corruption." 1 This stand implied, of course, an open 
rupture with much of his own literary past and his as- 
sociates in it. In his attitude towards the romanticists, 
especially the romantic poets — Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny, 
etc. — Sainte-Beuve is supposed to have been influenced 
by the jealousy of the unsuccessful creator for those 
whose creations have succeeded. But there is a larger 
aspect even to what seem the most personal of his feuds 
and animosities. He was only too capable of rancor, but 
he has in turn suffered more than most men from rancor 
in others. The reason he himself has very clearly stated : 

1 Chateaubriand, I, 102. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 137 

" Parties and sects have a deadly grudge against any 
one who, having passed through them, has refused to 
bind himself to them irrevocably. I have given no one 
the right to say i He is one of us.' I have certainly had 
my vices and weaknesses, but it is for what is good in 
me, for my love of integrity and truth and my inde- 
pendence of judgment, that I have irritated so many 
people in my life and aroused so much wrath." 1 Thus 
the romanticists and their partisans have borne Sainte- 
Beuve a deadly grudge and have sought to explain on 
personal grounds opinions that contain a serious judg- 
ment. Like Goethe, Sainte-Beuve as he grew older sided 
more and more with the Olympians against the Titans. 
It is as a humanist that he protests against the violence 
and excess of Hugo's romanticism, against the violence 
and excess of the naturalism of Balzac. Later, under the 
compliments he lavishes on his friend and admirer, Taine, 
one can distinguish the same note of protest against 
the dehumanizing tendencies of an excessive naturalism. 
" In spite of everything," he writes to a correspondent 
in explanation of his small esteem for Balzac, " I have 
continued of the classic school, that of Horace and the 
singer of Windsor Forest." 2 Yet nothing sounder and 
juster has been written on Balzac than Sainte-Beuve's 
article of 1850, 3 only a few years after Balzac's outrag- 
eous diatribe against him in the " Revue parisienne " 
(1840). 

Sainte-Beuve will never, I believe, rank with Boileau 
in the sureness of his judgments on contemporaries. 
1 Lundis, xvi, 44. 2 Nouvelle Cor., 235. 3 Lundis, n, 413 ff. 



138 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Yet as the nineteenth century, with its own special at- 
mosphere, recedes into the distance, these judgments 
are likely to be increasingly accepted. Indeed French- 
men are already coming around to them now that they 
are beginning to react against the romantic and natur- 
alistic movements. The " Chateaubriand " which called 
forth the most opposition and which suffers from an 
unmistakable bitterness of tone, is not only one of the 
most interesting of Sainte-Beuve' s works, but may also 
turn out to be one of the most judicious. In his recent 
book on the same subject, M. Lemaltre has done little 
more than reaffirm Sainte-Beuve, the only difference 
being that as he unveils depth upon depth of romantic 
egotism in Chateaubriand, he keeps repeating that, with 
all his faults, " we love him still." 

ii 

Sainte-Beuve lived in an age when it was especially 
difficult to adjust the claims of the real and the ideal in 
art. His perfect tact and measure and good sense can 
always be counted on to put him on his guard against 
everything that is extreme and one-sided, whether it 
claims to be ideal or naturalistic. He was impatient of 
those who set up as idealists, but were in reality only 
romantic dreamers, as well as of those who set up as 
idealists and were in reality only pseudo-classic formal- 
ists. " ye friends of the ideal," he writes with spe- 
cial reference to these latter, " I am not going to quarrel 
with you. I grant that there is an ideal ; but grant too 
that there is a true and a false one, and if ever you 



SAINTE-BEUVE 139 

come across an ideal or something that calls itself such, 
cold, monotonous, sad, colorless under its appearance 
of nobility, hazy, stiff, insipid, not brilliant and various 
like marble, but white like plaster, not full of warmth 
and power as in the flourishing days of Greece when 
warm torrents of purple blood throbbed through the 
veins of demi-gods and heroes, . . . but pale, blood- 
less, ascetic as in Lent, denying itself the sources of 
fruitful inspiration, living on pure abstractions, rheu- 
matic from head to foot, soaked and saturated with 
ennui, oh, make no mistake, that is the very ideal that 
has so long cast a chill over the French muses, and 
would be capable of chilling them again, that is the 
ideal to avoid." * In general he attacks those who try 
to confine beauty to some one type and produce ever 
paler and paler copies of it. 2 To be sure he would not 
have the writer, he says, display the point of the scal- 
pel " still dripping with blood and pus, but then again, 
let not thorough-going anatomy and physiology be dis- 
regarded and absent under your folds and draperies ; 
let us be conscious of genuine flesh and blood even un- 
der your silk and lace." 3 

Sainte-Beuve's own aim, as he says, was to introduce 
into criticism a certain charm and along with it more 
reality than had been put into it previously, in a word, 
poetry and a certain amount of physiology. 4 It is easy, 
indeed, to discern the disjecta membra of the romantic 
poet in his critical writing. He has in particular a 
strange knack for dissimulating his probing and dis- 

1 N. Lundis, i, 13. 2 Ibid., 14. » Ibid., v, 37. 4 Port, lit., m, 5^. 



140 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

secting under the flowers of metaphor. But if he did 
not fall into the naturalistic excess we must ascribe the 
fact less to his poetry, which is a romantic survival, 
than to his humanistic tact. He shrank back instinct- 
ively from anything that was violent and narrow and 
sectarian ; and naturalism as held by the men of the 
Second Empire was often all three. He was placed in a 
somewhat delicate situation because many of these men 
were his friends and in part his disciples. But even at 
the risk of having his motives misinterpreted he spoke 
out. The malignant gossip of the Goncourts is due in 
part to the sheer inability of the brothers to grasp the 
ideas that Taine, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, and others ex- 
changed at the Magny dinners, in part to resentment 
at the reservations Sainte-Beuve had made in regard to 
their own particular form of naturalism. He criticises in 
a similar spirit Flaubert's " Salammbo." " Let us never 
be in literature," he says, " among those who are called 
in this novel ' the eaters of unclean things.' " This over- 
refinement and perversion of taste seemed to him to 
mark the end of a literary school. He finds it impos- 
sible to belong to this school. "I will love you individ- 
ually," he says to Flaubert and his other ultra-natural- 
istic friends, "but I shall never be of your sect." 1 He 
rebelled especially against the penchant of the sectarian 
naturalists for what has been called aggressive unpleas- 
antness. " At the risk of losing what credit I may still 
have with many of my contemporaries," he writes, " and 
among them some who are very dear to me, I confess 

1 N. Lundis. rv, 91. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 141 

in matters of taste to a great weakness : I like what is 
agreeable." 1 His simple remark in a letter to Zola that 
the verb " wallow " (vautrer) 2 occurs too frequently in 
his novels is worth pages of ordinary criticism. 

Sainte-Beuve also made a humanistic protest against 
the dangers and excesses of scientific naturalism. Sci- 
ence is interested primarily not in the man who has 
assimilated the riches of tradition and is harmoniously 
developed and wise in himself, but in the man who can 
contribute definitely to the great cause of progress, 
which means practically in the specialist, the man who 
has fixed with enthusiasm and tenacity on some par- 
ticular field, at whatever risk of narrowing his horizons. 
Both the romantic and scientific sides of the naturalistic 
movement converge upon the idea of originality. We 
have already seen that the dangers of this modern con- 
ception of originality were visible to Sainte-Beuve in 
Cousin and his school. " Let us encourage," he says, 
" all laborious investigation, but let us give in every- 
thing the first place to talent, meditation, judgment, 
reason, taste." " It seems," he complains, anticipating 
Brunetiere and his " Fureur de l'lnedit," "that to edit 
an old book already published, or to print some insig- 
nificant scrap for the first time, is nowadays a more se- 
rious claim to esteem than to have a style and ideas." 3 

None appeared to Sainte-Beuve (again anticipating 
Brunetiere) more in need of moderating the fury of their 
research by a knowledge of the humanistic tradition 
than the medievalists. The resemblance between Sainte- 

1 N. Lundis, x, 403. 2 Cor., n, 315. 8 N. Lundis, v, 372. 



142 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Beuve and Goethe is here obvious. " True and incom- 
parable beauty," says Sainte-Beuve, " has shone forth in 
its perfect exemplars only once or perhaps twice under 
the sun. There are, to be sure, beauties of different sorts 
and degrees. The manifestations of human life and the 
human spirit are infinite. Let us welcome them all ; yet 
let those of us who have seen or glimpsed true beauty 
never forget it. Let us preserve faithfully within us its 
lofty and delicate image, if it were only that we might 
not lavish its name on every occasion and forever pro- 
fane it, as I see being done by estimable investigators 
who are deeply versed in mediaeval documents (qui out 
beauconp paperasse sur le Moyen-Age), and who have 
no knowledge of anything else." * " Many of these medi- 
evalists," he says again, referring especially to Paulin 
Paris, "do not possess in themselves all the necessary 
terms of comparison." 2 They fall into aberrations of 
taste that " would be impossible for any one who has 
read Sophocles in the original text." 3 

In speaking at one moment as a humanist and at 
another as a naturalist Sainte-Beuve is not, I must repeat, 
necessarily inconsistent. Yet the opposition between the 
two sides of his nature, between the scientific investiga- 
tor, and the aesthetic humanist, is at times unmistakable. 
To whom, for example is the conflict between head and 
heart not palpable in a passage like the following? 
" Where is the time when you could read a book even 
though you yourself were an author and a professional 
without so many complications. . . . The time when you 
i N. Lundis, m,378. 2 Ibid., 384. • Ibid., 396. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 143 

read ancients and moderns, reclining upon your couch, 
like Horace during the dog-days, or stretched out on 
your sofa like Gray, saying to yourself that you had 
something better than the joys of Paradise or Olympus ; 
the time when you could read strolling around in the 
shade, like that respectable Hollander, who said he could 
not imagine any greater happiness here below at the age 
of fifty than to walk slowly through a fair countryside, 
book in hand, closing it at intervals without desire or 
passion, sunk in meditation ; the time when like the 
'Header' of Meissonier in your solitary room on a 
Sunday afternoon near the open window overshadowed 
with honeysuckle, you read a unique and cherished 
book? What has become of this happy age? How very 
different things are to-day when you are always on pin- 
points in ' reading, and have constantly to be on your 
guard and interrogate yourself unceasingly, and ask 
whether it is the right text, whether there is n't some 
corruption, whether the author you are enjoying has n't 
taken it from somewhere else, whether he has copied 
reality or invented, whether he is really original and 
how, whether he was true to his nature, his race, etc. 
. . .and a thousand other questions which spoil pleas- 
ure, engender doubt, make you scratch your forehead, 
force you to climb up to the highest shelves of your 
library, to pull about all your books, to consult and 
make excerpts, finally to become once more a laborer and 
a workman instead of a voluptuary and delicate amateur 
who was breathing the spirit of things and taking of them 
only what he needed for his pleasure and delight. Epi- 



144 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

cureanism of taste, forever lost I fear ; hencef ortH impos- 
sible at least for all critics ; last religion even of those 
who had no other; last honor and virtue of a Hamilton 
and a Petronius, how I understand and regret you in the 
very act of opposing and abjuring you! " * 

The various virtues of the critic, including the rich- 
ness and depth of literary sensibility that appear in 
this passage, are so happily mingled in Sainte-Beuve 
that no one, I presume, would wish him different. Yet 
the passage also makes plain why he has been influential 
as a naturalist rather than as a humanist — quite apart 
from the fact that in his naturalism he fell in with the 
main current of his time. A humanism that hopes to 
act upon the world cannot afford to recline even with 
Horace and Gray. It must take hold on the character 
and will and not be simply epicurean: If humanism is 
merely an epicureanism of taste it is not only sure to be 
lost but the loss will not be altogether irreparable. Sainte- 
Beuve was very much preoccupied with the quarrel of 
ancients and moderns. His belief as to the final outcome 
may be inferred from the following : " Sooner or later 
I fear, the ancients with Homer at their head will lose 
the battle, or at least half the battle. Let us endeavor for 
the honor of the flag, we who are defending the retreat, 
that it may be as late as possible, and that innovation in 
literature, that innovation in part so legitimate, may 
nevertheless not put tradition utterly to rout." 2 

i N. Lundis, ix, 86-87. 2 find., v, 323. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 145 

ni 

In spite of this flourish of military metaphor we are 
not to look here for the militant side of Sainte-Beuve. 
He put forth a man's effort, only it was in the service of 
naturalism. " I have but one pleasure left," he writes, 
" I analyze, botanize ; I am a naturalist of minds. What 
I should like to establish is the natural history of litera- 
ture." 1 The method that Sainte-Beuve here outlines, so 
far from being humanistic, is in many respects antagon- 
istic to humanism. In order to make this clear we shall 
need to study his method in some detail, especially as 
set forth in the second article on Chateaubriand in the 
third volume of the "Nouveaux Lundis." He wrote 
the article partly in reply to the question that had been 
raised whether he had any method. He justified the 
somewhat uncoordinated aspect of his essays by saying 
that he was simply preparing sound monographs for 
some future generalizer. The science of criticism in his 
hands is in the same state as botany before Jussieu or 
comparative anatomy before Cuvier : but on the basis 
of all this detailed observation it may be possible to 
discover some day the great natural divisions corre- 
sponding to the families of minds. " These true and na- 
tural families of minds are not so numerous. ... It is 
just as in botany for plants, in zoology for the animal 
species. . . . One individual carefully observed is referred 
quickly to the species of which you knew only in a 
general way, and throws light on it." 2 

1 Port lit., m, 546. * Port-Royal, I, 55. 



146 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

One is inevitably led at this point to apply Sainte- 
Beuve's method to himself and ask what was the attitude 
of the primitive Sainte-Beuve towards this whole ques- 
tion, or at any rate of Sainte-Beuve before that moment 
in the century when any one who wished to be taken 
seriously had to make his peace with Science. 

The phrase I have just quoted, " One individual care- 
fully observed," puts us on the right track to the answer. 
Sainte-Beuve is interested before everything else in the 
living individual. A marvellous psychological finesse in 
seizing and rendering the living individual — this I be- 
lieve to have been his primordial gift. Behind the book 
he sees the man and in the man himself what is most 
vital, personal, characteristic, in a word, expressive. He 
would lay siege to his ultimate idiosyncrasy. He is an 
incomparable literary portrait-painter, or it might be 
more correct to say, in view of the infinite multiplication 
of fine strokes, a literary miniaturist. The best way to 
" judge and penetrate writers is to listen to them long 
and carefully ; just let them unfold themselves freely, 
without hurrying them, they will tell you everything 
about themselves, they will come and paint their images 
upon your mind." 1 (This passage also makes clear 
why Sainte-Beuve has been called a lay confessor.) 
When a writer has thus posed before you for a certain 
time, says Sainte-Beuve, there is mingled little by little 
with the vague abstract and general type which the first 
glance had taken in, an individual reality ; and " when 
at last you seize the familiar trick, the telltale smile, 

1 Chateaubriand, I, 161. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 147 

the indefinable wrinkle, the secret line of pain that is hid- 
den in vain under the already scanty hair, at that mo- 
ment analysis disappears in creation, the portrait speaks 
and lives, you have found the man." 1 Sainte-Beuve was 
only twenty-seven when he wrote these lines. Indeed 
some of the contortion of his earlier manner is to be 
ascribed to this almost desperate pursuit of the final 
degree of expressiveness. "I confess," he says, "that 
in my efforts to get a true likeness, to render the finer 
shadings of every physiognomy, I may at times have 
been far-fetched and over subtle." 2 In thus making ex- 
pressiveness his aim he realized that he was embarking 
in a sense on an impossible quest. " Can you ever flatter 
yourself that you know a soul?" — " the inexpressible 
monad," as he calls it elsewhere. When you seem to have 
reached something final it turns out to be expressive of 
something still more remote. Human nature is an end- 
less series of false bottoms. 

In this striving for the expressive, Sainte-Beuve is at 
the very heart of the nineteenth century. Beauty of 
form seemed to him the prerogative of the ancients. In- 
terest, curiosity, the faithful and various rendering of 
everything that goes on under our eyes without any 
preoccupation with the ideal, 3 he looked upon as be- 
longing rather to the moderns. He is not interested, 
however, primarily in expressiveness on the larger scale 
— in literature, for example, as an expression of society. 
He always keeps as close as possible to the individual. 
Unlike Taine, he loves to particularize rather than to 

1 Port, lit., i, 239. 3 Port, cont, I, 274. 8 N. Lundis, m, 409. 



148 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

generalize, to deal with men singly rather than in 
" zones or layers," to feel life in its infinite complexity 
rather than impose upon it logical formulae. He says 
that he is " habituated and inclined by nature to study 
especially individuals." * He takes a group like that of 
the Jansenists in the seventeenth century who at this 
distance are lost in a gray uniformity, and multiplies 
his fine shadings and delicate discriminations, until each 
figure of the group stands out distinctly. " To particu- 
larize Nicole," he says, "is the greatest service one can 
render him." 2 A greater particularizer in this sense 
than Sainte-Beuve never lived. When he has finished 
with M. de Saci he is justified in saying that we have 
got so close to him that we seem almost to hear him 
chatting. 3 Du Guet, again, " has his nuance which dis- 
tinguishes him from M. Singlin, from M. de Saci." 4 
On reading all these particulars, he says, " you feel as if 
you yourself belonged to this same society." 5 

An enormous knowledge of the facts, a marvellous psy- 
chological finesse and in addition a sort of divination, are 
needed thus to reanimate the past. In Sainte-Beuve, if any- 
where, is found the triumph of that historical second- 
sight on which the nineteenth century prided itself. 
Sainte-Beuve was aided in his art of mediating between 
the past and the present by the "moment" : he lived 
at a time when it was still possible to receive a living 
initiation into tradition, that is to say, to see the past 
as it saw itself, which means in practice to live in a 

1 N. Lundis, ix, 180. 2 Port-Royal, rv, 411. 8 Ibid. 

4 Port-Royal, v, 132. 6 Ibid., 512. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 149 

world of absolute values; it was already possible, on 
the other hand, to detach one's self from the past and to 
see it relatively and phenomenally. This art of medi- 
ating between the past and the present is becoming 
more difficult for us to-day. We tend to see the past 
only relatively; this relativism is further complicated 
by the dogma of Progress. This dogma is so successful 
in putting blinders on the human spirit not only be- 
cause it is a dogma, but a dogma founded upon the 
flux. For example, the writer of a recent book hurries 
through the palace of Versailles and decides that peo- 
ple who had such a defective system of plumbing and 
sanitation could hardly have been worth while. He evi- 
dently had no sense for the greatness man may attain 
with a system of plumbing different from his own, or 
indeed without any plumbing at all. 

Let us repeat that Sainte-Beuve's own hold on tra- 
dition and the sense of unity that goes with it was 
mainly aesthetic, and therefore comparatively ineffect- 
ive. He had no intuition of unity and was rightly skep- 
tical of any attempt to impose a mere logical unity upon 
the facts, and so was left without adequate counterpoise 
to his perception of the Many. Everything, including 
literary reputation, seemed to him subject to the same 
instability. He took as motto for his " Portraits Contem- 
porains " the sentence of Senac de Meilhan : " We are 
mobile and judge mobile beings." "Every day I 
change," he writes : " the years follow the years ; my 
tastes of a former season are no longer my tastes of to- 
day ; my friendships themselves wither up and are re- 



150 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

newed. Before the final death of the mobile being that 
bears my name, how many men have already died within 
me! — You think that I am speaking of myself personally, 
reader : but reflect a moment and see if the same is not 
true of you." 1 He sees everything gradually growing 
out of everything else and notes the almost impercept- 
ible differences that mark the transition from one stage 
to another of this growth. Man, according to Emerson, 
is a bundle of roots, and a knot of relations. No one 
ever surpassed Sainte-Beuve in following out the finest 
filaments of these relationships. However ineffective he 
may have been as a humanist, as a relativist he has been 
enormously influential. He has indeed been correctly 
defined in his influence as a great doctor of relativity. 
M. France, for example, writes of M. Lemaitre, " He has 
even more than Sainte-Beuve, from whom we are all 
sprung, the sense of the relative." 2 

It should appear from the foregoing in what sense 
Sainte-Beuve was from the outset and instinctively a 
naturaliste des espfits. His later endeavor in obedience 
to the spirit of the age to organize this instinctive 
naturalism into a definite method led him to the verge 
of pseudo-science ; but even here he is usually saved at 
the last moment by his native tact and prudence from 
taking the final step and looking on the living individ- 
ual, especially the superior individual, as a mere link in 
the chain of phenomena; just as in "Port-Royal" there 
is a point where he pauses and refuses to apply his nat- 
uralistic dissection to the ultimate raptures of religion. 

1 Port, lit., in, 544. a Vie lit., I, 9. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 151 

" Doubtless/' he says, " you will never be able to proceed 
for man exactly as for animals and plants. . . . He has 
what is called liberty." 1 Of some of his utterances 
one would be inclined to say, that though not pseudo- 
scientific in themselves, they encourage others to pseudo- 
science. 

IV 

But before discussing this point further let us take 
x$p in detail certain features of Saint-Beuve's method, 
illustrating his theory so far as possible from his actual 
practice. The first connection he establishes in his net- 
work of relativity is that between a work and its author ; 
between the author in turn and his family, race, and age ; 
and then between the age and the preceding age, and so 
on in widening circles. In thus seeking to account for a 
literary product in terms of natural causes, he keeps as 
close as possible, as I have said, to the specific and im- 
mediate, and is comparatively unconcerned with those 
more general causes, race and climate and the like, that 
are made so much of by Taine. He does not deny the 
importance of the racial factor, but says that this deep 
root is usually concealed. He admits that sooner or later 
the theory of climate and environment imposes itself. 
"As is the scene so are the actors. The ancients had 
the broad general perception of this relationship : it is 
for the moderns to work out the precise and detailed 
proof." 2 He protests, however, that this bond between 
localities and their inhabitants is being forced and exag- 
gerated even to the breaking point. 3 

1 if. Lundis, ni, 17. 2 Ibid., ix, 323. • Ibid., xin, 218. 



152 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

He is more at home in tracing the way in which one age 
is related to the previous age and grows inevitably out of 
it, inasmuch as this relationship is more literary and more 
readily studied in terms of the individual. He discovers, 
for example, 1 in the fine and ingenious, but somewhat 
manneristic turn of Du Guet's style something that 
smacks already of the eighteenth century. 1 "We have 
learned how to distinguish," he says, "wherein the style 
of the first period of Louis XIV differs from the aver- 
age style of the middle of the reign, and wherein this 
reign at its end has already its manner bordering on that 
of the eighteenth century. Pascal, Retz, and La Roche- 
foucauld do not write like La Bruyere, and the exquisite 
and just language that Madame de Maintenon in her 
old age teaches to the Due du Maine is not to be con- 
fused with any other nuance in the language of the same 
time." 2 

In virtue of the same historical sense, you come to 
perceive how the age of Louis XIV itself developed 
from the preceding age. You come to feel that the age 
of Louis XIV was not an accident ( ... as an ac- 
quaintance of mine once said) but rather the result and 
natural fruit of a continuous culture and development. 3 
In the same way you come to feel that the great 
writer is no more an accident than the great age. 
" After men like Saint-Cyran and Le Maitre and Saci, 
when we come to Pascal we are ready to see more 
clearly the proportions; ... to measure the glorious 
side of genius, without granting more than neces- 

i Port-Royal, vi, 21. 2 Lundis, v, 173. 3 N. Lundis, vi, 364. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 153 

sary to this glory. ... In a word, we are well and duly 
prepared." ' 

Almost any subject when thus studied relatively, that 
is, as the outgrowth of something else, ramifies in every 
direction. "If you live in a subject a short time," he 
says, " you are, as it were, in a city filled with friends. 
You can scarcely take a step in the main street without 
being instantly accosted right and left and invited to 
enter." 2 " Port-Royal " thus became not simply a history 
of Jansenism, but in at least an equal degree a history 
of French literature and society in the seventeenth cen- 
tury. In Sainte-Beuve's own phrase, it is simply a 
method for " traversing the epoch." 3 

If Sainte-Beuve likes to trace by individual examples 
the process by which one age passes over into another, 
by which as he would say the spiritual climate (le climat 
desespirits) changes, he gets still closer to biography, and 
is therefore still more at home, in studying the relation- 
ship between the individual and his epoch. The old criti- 
cism, as he says, was especially weak in this respect; for 
example, the defective historical sense of La Harpe ap- 
pears in the fact that he tries to represent the creative 
genius of Corneille as independent of circumstances. 4 
Sainte-Beuve insists for his part that it was possible for 
Corneille to create " Polyeucte " only because there was 
" something about him (whether he knew it or not) that 
equalled and reproduced the same miracles." 5 Racine 
again put into his work all the poetry properly so-called 
that the polite society of the time could receive. 6 Of 

1 Port-Royal, h, 376. 2 Ibid., i, 412. 8 Ibid., I, 146. 

4 Ibid., i, 119. 5 Ibid., 1, 115. • Ibid., vi, 128. 



154 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Balzac he says that his feeling for unity and the things 
of the spirit marked him a contemporary of Richelieu. 1 
Saint-Evremond, " the firm-souled epicurean/' acquired 
his insight into great historical characters as a result 
of his own experiences in the Fronde. 2 " That powerful 
spirit," he says of Arnauld, " remained more than half 
plunged in the general prejudices and zones of illusion 
prevailing in his time; his horizons were bounded on 
every hand." 3 The work even of so great an innovator as 
Chateaubriand is conditioned in the same way. Sainte- 
Beuve points out the analogy between the death of Atala 
and a group in marble by Canova. 4 

It is, however, with what we may term the purely 
biographical relationships that we reach the heart of 
Sainte-Beuve's method. First of all there is the connec- 
tion between the book and its author. In what M. Guizot 
offers him, he says, as a general solution of the problem 
of life, — a philosophy and theology, — he sees a distinct 
and special type of man determined by his temperament 
and past. 5 Since the work is thus expressive of the man, 
the important point is to know the man; and to know 
a man, in other words somethiug else than a pure spirit, 
we cannot go to work in too many different ways. We must 
approach him in the first place from the point of view of 
heredity, we must strive to discover what he owes to his 
ancestry and his parents, above all to his mother (great 
men nearly always have distinguished mothers), and how 

1 Port-Royal, i, 115. 

2 N. Lundis, in, 227. Saint-Evremond is another of the seventeenth- 
century " libertines " with whom Sainte-Beuve felt an inner kinship. 

• Port-Royal, v, 313. 4 Chateaubriand, I, 257. 6 N. Lundis, ix, 109. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 155 

he resembles his sisters (the sister of the great man some- 
times has a distinction superior to that of the great man 
himself) ; finally we must study him in his brothers and 
children. Nature frequently does the analyzing for us 
and traits are often easier to seize as they appear thus 
separately in them than when blended in the eminent 
person himself. 1 

We can thus follow Sainte-Beuve as he weaves about 
the individual the meshes of the new fatality. For ne- 
cessity, as Pater remarks, "has ceased to be for the 
moderns a sort of mythological personage without us, 
with whom we can do warfare : it is a magic web woven 
through and through us, like that magnetic system of 
which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a 
network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing 
in it the central forces of the world." Not only does a 
man's work reflect his temperament, but this tempera- 
mental self is constantly changing. We must learn to 
see these successive and fatal transformations of the in- 
dividual from youth to old age, and their relationship to 
his work, and for this another world of nuances is needed. 
I have already noted Sainte-Beuve's predilection for the 
first flush of youth, and that this is the form the cult 
of the primitive assumes in him. Man is most fully in 
possession of his faculties at the age of thirty-five. 
And then as we follow still further the fatal curve we 
come to the moment of decline when the very excess of 
the virtue becomes a fault, when some writers grow 
rigid and dry and wither, and others let themselves go, 

1 N. Lundis, m, 18 ff. 



156 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

when still others harden or become heavy, and when 
some grow sour ; when the smile becomes a wrinkle. 1 
The painter, Horace Vernet, has Sainte-Beuve's ap- 
proval because he went through all the stages of a 
noble career : " Like all complete organizations he had 
in succession the fruits of each season. The moment of 
his greatest merit coincides with the hour of his maturity 
and his old age did not lack serious thoughts." 2 " There 
comes an inevitable hour when everything grows dark 
within us and about us. Long before the arrival of this 
moment and in the midst of our last spells of sunshine, 
a sudden presentiment heralds it at times and the gay- 
est, the most prone to laughter, find themselves growing 
pensive." 3 Evidently a successful attempt to maintain 
one's faculties and spirits at their best level in old age 
would have seemed to Sainte-Beuve a sort of affront to 
the Goddess Natura. 

We must, however, deal with a man in a still more 
intimate and personal way. We must ask ourselves 
questions that at first sight seem most foreign to the 
nature of his writings. For example, " What were his 
religious opinions? How was he affected by the spec- 
tacle of nature? How did he behave in the matter of 
women? in the matter of money? Was he rich or poor? 
What was his hygiene and daily mode of life? Finally, 
what was his vice or weakness? Every man has one." 4 
This theory of the essential vice, we may note in pass- 
ing, Sainte-Beuve probably took from La Rochefou- 

1 N. Lundis, ni, 26-27. 2 Ibid., v, 62. 

« Ibid., 122. 4 Ibid., in, 28. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 157 

cauld. 1 It was also an important part of Sainte-Beuve's 
method to get at the fault of the master by studying 
its exaggeration in the disciples. He is ready to carry 
even to the foot of the altar and beyond what he calls 
his "intimate perscrutation of talents." 2 " When you 
have to do with a woman," he says, " even with a model 
of saintliness, two or three inevitable questions present 
themselves : Was she pretty? Did she ever fall in love? 
What was the determining motive of her conversion?" 3 
The perils of the pursuit of la verite vraie when 
pushed to this point are manifest. The " grand " curi- 
osity (la qrande, curiosite), in the name of which Sainte- 
Beuve would pursue his inquiries, may very easily de- 
generate into curiosity of the petty and even the prurient 
type. " I have observed," says Addison ironically, " that 
a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he 
knows whether the writer of it be a black or fair man," 
etc. This universal human instinct flourished as never 
before in the nineteenth century, when instead of 
having any check put upon it, it received a sort of 
scientific sanction. " Our century," says Sainte-Beuve, 
" loves these intimate details. It never can get too many 
of them." 4 Yet it has been said that when a man falls 
into his anecdotage it is all over with him, and the 
same may be true of criticism. We can follow Sainte- 
Beuve's own method here and study the master's fault 
as exaggerated in the disciples. Critics less discreet and 

1 " II n'y a guere de personnes qui dans le premier penchant de l'age 
ne f assent connaitre par ou leur corps etleur esprit doivent ddfaillir." 
a N. Lundis, vi, 419. 8 Ibid., I, 213. * Ibid., xh, 215. 



158 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

tactful than he have indulged in a veritable orgy of 
biographical and autobiographical indiscretions. Under 
pretext of explaining the author's work all the decencies 
of his private life have been violated; in Peacock's 
phrase, " he has been dished up like a savory omelette to 
gratify the appetite of the reading rabble for gossip." 

Sainte-Beuve has spoken with fitting contempt of the 
more trivial forms of curiosity, but he cannot himself 
be held to have been entirely free from them. Are we 
helped for instance, in judging the writing of Charles 
Magnin by a knowledge of the fact that every evening 
about nine he used to see his grandmother safely to 
bed? 1 Is much light thrown on Nicole's spiritual nature 
by knowing how often he shaved or that his wig was 
frequently on awry ? 2 Nicole would have a right to ex- 
claim with the Keverend Dr. Folliott, " What business 
have the public with my nose and wig ? " Sainte-Beuve 
is not above commenting on Michaud's finger nails (il 
les avaitfortnoirs,les ongles), 3 and used occasionally, 
we are told, to invite in to dinner the cook of Dr. Veron 
so that he might gossip with her about the great per- 
sonages of the Second Empire. 4 

Unless we go into details of this kind, Sainte-Beuve 
would tell us, we are likely to have some Olympian simu- 
lacrum palmed off on us as the actual person. He would 
have us perfect ourselves in what, according to Chamfort, 
is the greatest of all arts, the art of not being taken in. 
Strange things, for example, went on under the smooth 

1 N. Lundis, v, 456. * Port-Royal, iv, 698. 

8 Lundis, xi, 486. * See Nouvdle Cor., 226. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 159 

surface of the somewhat Jesuitical decorum of the sev- 
enteenth century. Where should we be if we had 
not a Saint-Simon to warn us against this false nobility 
and under the solemn and conventional poses to show 
us the real man? 1 Sainte-Beuve often reminds one of 
Thackeray, especially in this instinct for uncovering 
shams. " Queen Anne," says Thackeray, " was only a 
hot red-faced woman not in the least resembling that 
statue of her which turns its stone back on Saint Paul's," 
etc. Louis XIV, again, "was a hero for a book if you 
like, or for a brass statue or a painted ceiling — a god 
in Roman shape, but what more than a man for Madame 
de Maintenon, or the barber who shaved him or Monsieur 
Fagon, his surgeon?" If we are to get at the real man, 
we must, it would seem, see him through the eyes of his 
barber, or his surgeon, or possibly his cook. It has been 
said of Sainte-Beuve as of Voltaire that he had a grudge 
against all pedestals. He would do for his time what 
Saint-Simon did for his and put posterity on its guard. 
He excels in what one may term the disenchanting anec- 
dote. He relates, for example, how one day he was with 
Chateaubriand at Madame Recamier's when Lamartine 
came in. "Jocelyn" had just appeared and Madame 
Recamier began to praise the book eagerly to Lamartine, 
who entered with naive fatuity into this praise of him- 
self. But Chateaubriand when called upon by Madame 
Recamier to bear witness also, did not utter a word ; he 
simply took his scarf and held it between his teeth accord- 
ing to his wont when determined not to speak. Scarcely, 

1 N. Lundis, x, 268. 



160 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

however, had Lamartine left the room when Chateau- 
briand burst out all at once, as if he were alone, and ex- 
claimed, " The great ninny I" (le grand dadais). " I 
was there," adds Sainte-Beuve, "and I heard it." 1 After 
a few anecdotes of this kind we are in no danger of seeing 
either Chateaubriand or Lamartine on pedestals. 

1 

Any process of idealization not only seemed to Sainte- 
Beuve unreal in itself, but it interfered with the virtue, 
that, as I have already said, he was chiefly seeking in 
common with his century — expressiveness. However 
far he fell short of the antique symmetry, he could at 
least render life in all its infinite variety, and did so with 
extraordinary success. No writer is more vital. He is at 
once the best read and the least bookish of critics. The 
actual men of the past rise before us, not precisely in 
their habits as they lived, but, what is more to the 
purpose, each in his inner psychological truth. To 
read Sainte-Beuve is to enlarge one's knowledge, not 
merely of literature but of life. Indeed, the somewhat 
paradoxical charge may be brought against his criti- 
cism that it is not sufficiently literary. He says of 
himself, it is true, that he was one of those who had 
the religion of letters, and so indeed he had — in about 
the sense, to quote his own phrase, that a Hamilton or 
a Petronius had it. I do not believe that the religion of 
letters, or even a sound defence of literary tradition, is, 
in the long run, compatible with Sainte-Beuve's philo- 

1 Chateaubriand, n, 389-90. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 161 

sophy of life. His own performance we must repeat is 
unique. But we have a right to judge it not only in 
itself, but in its tendency and influence, in its relation 
to the laws of its genre. Now thus considered criticism 
in Sainte-Beuve is plainly moving away from its own 
centre towards something else ; it is ceasing to be literary 
and becoming historical and biographical and scientific. 
It illustrates strikingly in its own fashion the drift of 
the nineteenth century away from the pure type, the 
genre tranche, towards a general mingling and confusion 
*of the genres. We are scarcely conscious of any change 
when Sainte-Beuve passes, as he does especially in the 
later volumes of the "Nouveaux Lundis," from writers 
to generals or statesmen. 

Yet history and biography and science are at best 
preparations for literary criticism, preparations that are 
always relevant to be sure, but likely to be less relevant 
in direct ratio to the distinction of the man who is being 
criticized. The greater the man, for example, the more 
baffling he is likely to be to students of heredity. The 
higher forms of human excellence, says Dante,, are rarely 
subject to heredity; and this God wills in order that we 
may know that they come from him alone. The truth 
Dante thus puts theologically is, I believe, a matter of 
observation so far as the past is concerned. As for the 
future it is not yet clear that our schemes of eugenics 
are going to outwit Gojd. The genius of Keats is pre- 
cisely that part of him that cannot be explained by 
the fact that he was the son of the keeper of a London 
livery stable. In this sense we may say with Emerson 



162 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

that "great geniuses have the shortest biographies." 
"Can any biography/' he says, "shed light on the 
localities into which the ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' 
admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary 
or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, 
the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of 
Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight 
of Portia's villa, 'the antres vast and desarts idle' of 
Othello's captivity, — where is the third cousin, or grand- 
nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts, or private let- 
ter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets ? 
In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art . . . 
the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the cre- 
ative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, 
swhich sees the works and asks in vain for a history." 

Sainte-Beuve was of course too shrewd to make of 
genius merely a product, to claim that it can be dealt 
with merely in terms of heredity and environment. " Very 
great individuals," he says, " are independent of a group " 1 
(Les tres grands individus sepassent de groupe)? They 
become a centre themselves and people gather about 
them. Ordinary talents are imprisoned in their time, he 
says, following Goethe; when they have given back to 
their time what they have received from it, they are 
poor. But the true genius does not depend on borrowed 
waters, he is an ever-flowing fountain. Sainte-Beuve 

1 " Group " as used by Sainte-Beuve is applied to individuals born 
about the same time and brought more or less into contact with one an- 
other. It is not to be confounded with a " natural family of minds, " the 
members of which may be widely scattered in time and space. 

2 N. Lundis, ni, 23. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 163 

pointed out with masterly precision the weakness of the 
naturalistic method when pushed to its last extremity 
by Taine. He had, at all events, in a high degree the sense 
of the uniqueness and inexpressibleness of the human 
monad. There are no equivalents, he insists, in matters of 
taste. Suppose one great talent less, suppose the magic 
mirror of a single true poet shattered in the cradle at its 
birth, there will never be another that will be exactly the 
same or that will take the place of it. 1 As some one puts it, 
one trembles to think that Shakespeare and Cervantes 
were subject to the measles at the same time. 

Yet Sainte-Beuve has his own naturalistic method and 
cannot refrain from a certain satisfaction when an author 
and his work are less unique and so more capable of 
being explained. " In truth," he says, " M. Coulmann 
pleases me in his 'Memoires' by his very lack of all 
originality. He is the honorable and facile expression of 
the environment in which he lives ; he registers its temper- 
ature for us with a good deal of precision, without the 
admixture or resistance of too individual a character/' 2 
We here begin to see how Sainte-Beuve, without being 
pseudo-scientific himself, yet points the way to pseudo- 
science. This passage is a sort of first adumbration of 
the pseudo-scientific theory of the normal man. "Nor- 
mally," says Sainte-Beuve, "fifteen years constitute 
a literary career." 3 His own career ran to just three 
times this length, and he ended in better form than he 
began. He was also comparatively cheerful at the end, 
whereas at the beginning he was lugubrious. That first 

1 N. Lundis, vm, 86. a Ibid., o, 141. • Ibid., m, 27. 



164 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

bloom of youth that he in general found so enchanting, 
was in his own case a flear du mal. How are we to ac- 
count by Sainte-Beuve's method for the fact that Tenny- 
son wrote some of his best lyrics (" Crossing the Bar/' for 
example) when above seventy, that Titian painted some of 
his best pictures when above eighty, that Sophocles wrote 
one of his best plays, the " CEdipus at Colonus, " when 
above ninety? Yes, we are told, but these men are excep- 
tions. The obvious reply is that men have a rank in 
literature only by being exceptional and that in order 
to have high rank they must be supremely exceptional. 
Thereupon the pseudo-scientist, who sees the human 
spirit escaping him, takes the step that Sainte-Beuve 
does not himself take, and identifies the exceptional with 
the morbid and the pathological. The man who is not 
normal as he understands the term, that is, who is not 
studiously commonplace and above all unimaginative, 
he sets down as a distinguished degenerate. Few things 
are likely to seem more repulsive in the retrospect than 
the dealings of pseudo-science in the second half of 
the nineteenth century with the man of genius. There is 
something in the spirit of man that looks down upon and 
mocks these attempts of the scientific intellect to confine 
it in f ormulse, of the lower element to impose itself dog- 
matically on the higher. We should admit, however, 
that the emotional side of the modern movement has 
cooperated here as elsewhere with the scientific side and 
produced in confirmation of the thesis a long series of 
eccentric and pathological geniuses from Rousseau down. 
The whole confusion as to the nature of genius has 



SAINTE-BEUVE 165 

arisen from a neglect of Plato's simple distinction be- 
tween the two kinds of madness — " the one produced 
by human infirmity, the other by a divine release from 
the ordinary ways of men." To feel a writer's "madness" 
in the Platonic sense is to feel his sheer elevation. Man, 
says Emerson, is great only by the supernatural ; and 
this coincides with the definition Longinus gives of the 
sublime. 1 Both writers, it scarcely seems necessary to 
add, mean by the supernatural not the thaumaturgical, 
but what is above the ordinary intellect. Now Sainte- 
Beuve had comparatively little of the Longinian or 
Emersonian sense of the sublime. He asserted that this 
lack was more or less a racial trait. In his criticism 
as in his poetry he was, in his own phrase, for stopping 
half-way up the hill. Criticism, one may add, as he con- 
ceives it, is a sort of half creation (like that of an actor 
creating a role), and he has been accused, as various 
actors have been, of preferring a role in which his own 
creative power would not be too much overshadowed by 
that of his author. 

Whatever the cause, he is plainly more concerned in 
arriving at horizontality, if I may be allowed the word, 
than in determining altitudes. There is an element of 
truth in the saying that in his pages all men are six 
feet tall. He exercises his incomparable gift for psycho- 
logical biography with at least as much complacency on 
second-rate as on first-rate writers. He obeys too far at 
times the injunction ne despicias minores. One angel, 
we are told, differs from another angel in glory. His 

1 On the Sublime, c. xxxvi. 



166 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

effort at times would seem rather to show how one 
minor author differs from another minor author in in- 
significance. I have already dwelt on his gift for dis- 
covering even in the smallest writer his shade of origin- 
ality. Like a modern pragmatist he escapes from the 
formulae of the intellectualist by his lively intuitions 
of the Many, and not like a Platonist by his intuitions 
of the One. He is therefore less excellent in showing 
wherein a man is great than wherein he is individual. 
He did not undertake, however, to topple over the ped- 
estals of any of the supreme figures of literature (with 
the very doubtful exception of Chateaubriand), but is 
inclined at times to pass these figures by. He is more 
at home, it has been said, with the Greek Anthology 
than with iEschylus. There is an evident opposition be- 
tween his naturalistic temper and the Longinian or 
Emersonian doctrine that man is great only by the super- 
natural. The general result of his method is on the 
contrary, as he expresses it, to " desuper naturalize " 
genius. 

VI 

I have reserved for more detailed treatment at this 
point the side of Sainte-Beuve's method that tends most 
clearly to desupernaturalize genius, but also shows how 
his naturalism was happily tempered even in its extreme 
applications by his humanism. The doctrine I refer to, 
if one may use so dogmatic a word in speaking of 
Sainte-Beuve, is that of the master faculty along with 
the closely allied theories of natural sympathies and an- 
tipathies and of the " natural families of intellects." 



SAINTE-BEUVE 167 

The more general hypothesis as to natural families of 
intellects may be dismissed very briefly for the reason 
that Sainte-Beuve himself makes only slight use of it. 
If worked out with any rigor, it would almost inevitably 
run into pseudo-science. If we note certain recurring 
types in human history, the type of the great dominator 
like Richelieu or Bonaparte, for example, are we to trace 
their common passion for domination to the fact that 
they were conformed organically, and one is tempted to 
say zoologically, in the same way? Sainte-Beuve even 
speaks in one passage of a natural family of mystics. 1 In 
such classifications he does not seem to have avoided 
entirely that dangerous juggling with the words " nature ' ' 
and " natural " that so permeates our modern thought. 
There evidently intervenes here a force that is peculiar 
to human nature, the instinct of conscious imitation 
even of the distant past. If one of the mystics Sainte- 
Beuve mentions had lived on an island in the South 
Sea, and had never heard of Saint Augustine or of 
Christianity in general, would he have become a mystic 
by the fatal unfolding of some inner organ or faculty? 

That men are born with certain leanings and are 
drawn to men who have leanings like their own and re- 
pelled by those whose leanings are too different, is not 
in itself a pseudo-scientific theory, but a fact, a fact 
indeed so patent that men observed it long ago and de- 
vised their own explanations. Some knowledge of this 
past theory is an aid to the understanding of the theory 
in its modern phases. Sainte-Beuve himself frequently 

1 Port-Royal, iv, 322. 



168 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

refers to Pope and his utterances on the ruling pas- 
sion ; it may be helpful to go for a moment even behind 
Pope. 

The older explanations are usually associated with the 
theory of the humors which comes down from classical 
antiquity. A man's temperament was supposed to arise 
from the proportion in which the four elements were 
mingled in him : — 

" Hot, Cold, Moist and Dry, four champions fierce, 
Strive here for mastery." 

The element that prevailed over the others determined 
his humor. Men of similar humors naturally attracted, 
those of opposite complexions naturally repelled, one 
another. Ben Jonson's familiar definition of a humor 
also defines excellently the ruling passion : — 

" When some one peculiar quality 
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw 
All his affects, his spirits and his powers 
In their confluxions all to run one way, 
This may be truly said to be a humor." 

The humors in their attractions and repulsions were also 
accounted for astrologically. Men were differently con- 
stellated. According to the ruling planet their disposi- 
tions were jovial, mercurial, saturnine, etc. 

In the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth 
centuries, the theory of humors passes over into that 
of the ruling passion. We can follow in the process a 
gradual yielding of the religious or the humanistic to the 
naturalistic view of life. From this point of view Pope's 
" Epistle to Cobham " marks an epoch. The frequency 



SAINTE-BEUVE 169 

with which Sainte-Beuve refers to Pope is perhaps due in 
part to his satisfaction at finding a humanistic authority 
for a conception that in its extreme form is subversive 
of both humanism and religion. The confusion in Pope's 
own mind between the two opposing views of life is 
evident. At one moment he tells us that the ruling pas- 
sion is the "mind's disease/' at another he proclaims, 
like a disciple of Rousseau, 

" The surest virtues thus from passions shoot, 
Wild nature's vigor working at the root." 

Dr. Johnson at any rate is not open to the charge of 
inconsistency in his defence of the religious view of life. 
More than any man of his time, perhaps, he saw the full 
implication of the theory of the ruling passion and never 
missed an opportunity to attack Pope for espousing it. 
" This doctrine," he says, " is in itself pernicious as well 
as false." " True genius is a mind of large general powers 
accidentally determined to some particular direction." 
" I am persuaded that had Sir Isaac Newton applied to 
poetry he would have made a very fine epic poem. I 
could as easily apply to law as to tragic poetry." To this 
last assertion we assent with a smile. In his indignation 
at those who would make mind mechanical, Johnson 
plainly overleapt himself, and flew in the face of facts 
of common observation. 

Even more fatal to Johnson's campaign against the 
ruling passion was the fact that it ran counter to the 
main currents of the time. With the advent of the ro- 
mantic theory of spontaneity, the idea that a man has 
only to follow his original genius, in other words, his 



170 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ruling impulse, received a tremendous impetus. Lamb 
and Hazlitt, to mention two representative romantic 
critics in England, simply revel in fatal temperamental 
leanings and the sympathies and antipathies that they 
imply. " The dilatory man," says Hazlitt, " never be- 
comes punctual. Resolution is no avail. . . . Can you 
talk or argue a man out of his humor? . . . The disease 
is in the blood/' etc. He believes in the fatality not only 
of individual but of national humors. " Who shall make 
the French respectable?" he asks, "or the English 
amiable? " Lamb is prone rather to dwell on inevitable 
attractions and repulsions. He declares that he himself 
is "the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipa- 
thies." He had been trying all his life to like Scotch- 
men and had been obliged to desist from the experiment 
in despair. His mind was in its constitution essentially 
anti-Caledonian. He can believe the story of two per- 
sons meeting (who never saw one another before in their 
lives) and instantly fighting. He quotes with approval 
a story from Haywood's " Hierarchie of Angels," of a 
Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdi- 
nand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no 
other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy 
which he had taken to the first sight of the king/ 

" The cause which to that act compelled him 
Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him." 

The form in which Thackeray holds the doctrine is 
even closer to Sainte-Beuve. u We like or dislike each 
other," says Thackeray, "as folks like or dislike the 
odor of certain flowers, or the taste of certain dishes or 



SAINTE-BEUVE 171 

wines, or certain books. We can't tell why ; but as a gen- 
eral rule, all the reasons in the world will not make us 
love Doctor Fell, and as sure as we dislike him, we may 
be sure that he dislikes us." Thackeray would have us 
believe that an antipathy of this kind existed between 
Fielding and Richardson. " Fielding could n't do other- 
wise," he says, " than laugh at the puny cockney book- 
seller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental 
twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a mollcoddle and 
a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, 
and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loud- 
est in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming 
in over thousands of emptied bowls, and reeled home 
to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman. Rich- 
ardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dow- 
agers, and fed on muffins and bohea. ' Milksop ! ' roars 
Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop-shutters. 
6 Wretch ! Monster ! Mohock ! ' shrieks the sentimental 
author of ' Pamela ' ; and all the ladies of his court 
cackle out an affrighted chorus." 

The theory of the humors, then, and their inevitable 
attractions and repulsions came to Sainte-Beuve as a 
part of the naturalistic inheritance. First, as to the at- 
tractions and repulsions, we may note a parallel here as 
elsewhere between Sainte-Beuve and Goethe, who is 
nevertheless no fatalist. " If we survey the history of 
the past," says Goethe, " we shall everywhere encounter 
personalities with some of whom we could agree and 
with others of whom we should certainly find ourselves 
quarreling ere long." We are told to love our neighbor 



172 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

as ourself . If he belongs to a different natural family, 
replies Sainte-Beuve, so far from loving him, we are 
forced to hate him. Que voulez-vous? It is in our 
blood and temperament. After his wont, however, 
he confines the theory to the individual. He does not, 
like other naturalistic theorists, evoke those terrific vis- 
ions of whole races and nationalities impelled to mutual 
slaughter by a sort of zoological necessity, the outcome 
of almost imperceptible differences in their cranial 
measurements. In its application to the individual, how- 
ever, there are few theories that he employs more fre- 
quently. How, for instance, are you going to force 
Boileau to enjoy Quinault, or Fontenelle to have much 
regard for Boileau, or Joseph de Maistre to love Vol- 
taire ? 1 Montaigne and Malebranche belonged to differ- 
ent natural families and were mutually antipathetic; 2 
so were Nisard and Ampere, 3 Schlegel and Sismondi, 4 
Mole and Alfred de Vigny, 5 Colle and J.-J. Rousseau, 6 
Boileau and Perrault, 7 etc. Emerson called Poe the "jingle 
man." That simply shows, Sainte-Beuve would have said, 
that Poe and Emerson were natural antipathies. " What 
God hath put asunder," as Emerson himself phrases 
it, " let no man join together." Of how many meetings 
might one say what De Quincey says of the meeting of 
Wordsworth and the precise, calculating, unpoetical 
M. Simon ; " They met, they saw, they inter despised." 
" As is well known," says Sainte-Beuve, " there is no- 

i N. Lundis, I, 300. 2 Port-Royal, v, 391. 8 N. Lundis, xm, 236. 

* Ibid., vi, 45. 6 N. Lundis, vi, 438. • Ibid., vn, 376. 

* Ibid., i, 300. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 173 

thing more acrimonious in its way than the hatreds of 
librarians ; that is to say, of people who see one another 
daily, who are seated almost opposite one another, who 
detest each other from one table to another and who 
spend their lives in accumulating contrary fluids." 1 Li- 
brarians are thus put on a level with electric jars. Does 
not Sainte-Beuve often make the whole process too in- 
stinctive? An agreement or conflict of interests may 
run counter to these temperamental fatalities and rise 
superior to them. If the English and Germans are now 
glowering at each other across the Channel, it is less 
because they are naturally antipathetic than because they 
conflict in their interests and ambitions. A century ago 
when they had similar interests and ambitions, they 
sank their natural antipathies (assuming that any such 
exist). A change or shifting of belief again draws a 
man towards many persons by whom ,he was formerly 
repelled. Renan, for example, when young, attacked 
Beranger and his epicurean philosophy. Sainte-Beuve 
declared that Beranger and Renan were natural an- 
tipathies, but as Renan himself grew more epicurean 
with advancing years, he came to praise in Beranger 
the very traits he had formerly blamed. 2 

VII 

But let us come to Sainte-Beuve's ideas about the 
master faculty itself of which the theory of sympathies 
and antipathies is after all only one aspect. As a dis- 
ciple of La Rochefoucauld Sainte-Beuve believed that 
1 N. Lundis, v, 452. » Cf . p. 288. 



174 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

a man is always governed in the last analysis by his 
self-love. Now what is most intimate in a man's self is 
the master impulse that has been implanted in him by 
nature. A main form of self-love is therefore the pas- 
sion for self-expression, for the unrestrained play of this 
master impnlse. This is the secret mainspring that ex- 
plains everything else. A man may restrain to some 
extent his minor impulses, but not his master impulse 
— lejeu de la faculte premiere is beyond his control. 
Sainte-Beuve generalized in part from his own experi- 
ence with the pseudo-idealists of the romantic move- 
ment. " I do not believe in the freedom of the will," he 
wrote to Cousin, u because I do not believe that it is in 
your power to put a check on your main appetite." 1 
Temperament understood in this sense is, as Emerson 
says, " unconsumable even in the fires of religion." "It 
puts all divinity to rout." Sainte-Beuve takes an almost 
malicious pleasure in showing the survival of the ego in 
its essential impulse even after religious conversion. 
Converts are no friends of mine, said Goethe. Sainte- 
Beuve might have said the same, and this because con- 
versions are " upsets of nature," 2 denials of the law of 
temperament. On a beau etre saint, on a son petit 
amour-propre.* " The mark of the natural vocation still 
persists under the cross." 4 Each Port-Royalist still pre- 
serves after conversion distinct traits of his tempera- 
ment and nature. Pascal even when converted retains 
his passion for geometry (though flattering himself that 

i Cor., i, 118. 2 Port-Royal, I, 401. 

8 Port-Royal, n, 284. * Ibid., iv, 335. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 175 

he despises it). Racine in his nights of repentance was 
haunted by some passionate tragedy, by the figure of 
some Monime in tears, and before he could reduce the 
guilty vision to silence, he composed melodious lines, 
whole scenes perhaps, that were heard by himself alone. 1 
But a rare and special gift like that of 'Racine is 
itself susceptible of a religious explanation. Talent, 
Sainte-Beuve admits, is at the origin a gratuitous gift, 
a sort of undeserved predestination, in a word a grace, 
in all the rigor of the Jansenist and Augustinian sense, 
quite apart from a man's will and works. You thus find 
" deep down in the gifted individual one of those mys- 
teries which show to what a point psychological observ- 
ation alone encounters in other terms the same prob- 
lems as theology." 2 Still it makes a difference whether 
one deals with these problems in a religious or natural- 
istic temper. " There is no lack of people," he says, 
" who are scandalized every time that they thus find set 
forth without any concealment the doctrine of divine 
grace. But have these same persons ever reflected on 
that strange fatality which sets its deep and distinct 
mark upon us even from our birth and childhood? 
Either these persons are religious or they are not. If 
they are not religious, I can understand perfectly that 
they fall back on the physiological explanation of race, 
temperament, etc. If on the other hand they do think, 
themselves religious, to what doctrine will* they have re- 
course which does not enter into that of divine grace ? " 
(We may note in passing that Sainte-Beuve neglects a 

1 Port-Royal, m, 315. 3 Ibid., 1, 116. 



176 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

third hypothesis, that embodied in the Oriental doctrine 
of karma). " But after all most minds are neither relig- 
ious nor the contrary. They float around in the inter- 
mediary space and shrink from the consequences : they 
remain at the halfway house in everything — this is 
what is called common sense, that is to say, the average 
degree of illusion." 1 

In the battle that is thus engaged, as he phrases it, 
between the Christian and naturalistic moralists 2 he 
plainly inclines towards the latter. Speaking of Male- 
branche he says, " I hope I may be allowed a compari- 
son which would make solemn philosophers frown if 
there were any left, but which would make Montaigne 
smile. Malebranche discovered one day his talent for 
metaphysics on reading Descartes's treatise on ' Man/ 
just as Garat, the singer, discovered one day his voice 
when still a child and on coming out of a performance 
of the c Armide ' of Gluck. The latter, the singer, disap- 
peared for more than a day. His family searched for 
him ; his father, worried, had the streets of the city 
scoured in every direction. One of his brothers, going 
to the further end of the garden, found open an old 
store-room that was usually closed. He enters there, 
and finds to his great amazement the young Garat. 
6 What 's the matter ? What are you doing here ? ' i Si- 
lence/ said the boy, ' sit down and listen.' And he be- 
gan to sing to him the opera of c Armide ' which he knew 
by heart without having learned it, and which he had 
been constantly repeating like a nightingale for twenty- 

1 Port-Royal, m, 491. 2 Ibid., vi, 107. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 177 

four hours past. Divine singer, and almost divine meta- 
physician, your themes and your music differ, but it is 
from nature that you both proceed." 

We have heard of the poets who lisped in numbers, 
for the numbers came. Sainte-Beuve is very fond in 
general of studying this first awakening of a vocation. 1 
M. Le Tourneux, for example, was born a preacher. 
When he was still a child at Rouen, people used to 
amuse themselves after church by setting him up on an 
arm-chair and getting him to preach over again the ser- 
mon they had just heard. 2 As often conceived by Sainte- 
Beuve the master faculty is plainly organic. Thus he 
says of Horace Vernet that "on both his father's and 
mother's side everything had contributed to make of 
him a man of the brush, — involuntarily and irresistibly 
a painter; his hand, delicate, slender, long and elegant, 
was born with all the special aptitudes, ready formed 
and fitted to paint as the foot of the Arab horse is to 
run." 3 Here again we are reminded of Thackeray. "'I 
never can desire/ says Mrs. Warrington, 'that my son 
and the grandson of the Marquis of Esmond should be 
a fiddler.' l Should be a fiddlestick, my dear,' the old 
colonel answered. ' . . . Suppose George loves music ? 
You can no more stop him than you can order a rose 
not to smell sweet, or a bird not to sing.' i A bird ! a 
bird sings from nature ; George did not come into the 
world with a fiddle in his hand,' says Mrs. Warrington 
with a toss of her head." I confess that my sympathies 
in this dialogue are with Mrs. Warrington. 

1 Port-Royal, rv, 8. 3 Ibid., v, 210. » N. Lundis, v, 43. 



178 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

At other times the master faculty appears to Sainte- 
Beuve in its early manifestations as a sort of daemonic 
power, almost independent of the conscious self and 
riding it irresistibly. "His vocation gets the upper 
hand," he says of Moliere, and the " demon rages within 
him never to cease again. . . . The theatre needed him, 
and he needed the theatre." 1 Racine again was ready 
to attack even his saintly masters of Port-Royal when 
he found them in the way of his passion. " Woe to those, 
whoever they may be, that you thus encounter across 
the path of your master passion when it is in haste to 
find an outlet. They make a mistake. Later when this 
poetical passion is satisfied and about exhausted, Racine 
will return to them and make them honorable amends. 
That will be easy for him, the favorite passion, the young, 
greedy, hungry and irritated passion no longer being 
there between them and him." 2 

Just as Sainte-Beuve likes to show that the secret 
mainspring of every man is operative in him even before 
the awakening of reason, so he likes to show, very much 
in the fashion of Pope, that it survives reason and sets 
its seal on his dying breath : " The miser up to the last 
moment refuses to say c I give.' If you whisper in the 
ear of the geometrician in his death agony, ' What is the 
square of twelve?' he will answer as though you had 
pressed the spring of a machine, 'One hundred and 
forty-four.' The poet is infatuated with immortality and 
thinks of his verses. The hero sees once more in his 
delirium his military trophies and his comrades in the 
i N. Lundis, v, 270. 2 Ibid., vi, 98. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 179 

clouds. The writer dies correcting proof. . . . Paillet 
asked to have his lawyer's gown for a shroud. A jockey, 
knocked over in a race, and rolling half dead upon the 
track, still moved his fingers, muttering, 'My whip/ In 
Balzac the Baron Hulot, in his dotage, says to his cook 
to seduce her, ( Agathe, you will be a baroness ' ; and he 
will live long enough to keep his promise. Every man 
dies in his own element." 1 

The last words of Piron, says Sainte-Beuve, must have 
been a diatribe against Voltaire. Sainte-Beuve's treat- 
ment of Piron illustrates, indeed, his view of the master 
faculty in its extreme form and so is worth dwelling on 
for a moment. Piron' s ruling impulse was to make epi- 
grams. He was an admirable automaton, according to 
Sainte-Beuve, set up by nature to launch sallies and 
epigrams. 2 " Whether it was the Almighty, a friend, a 
relative, anybody in fact, when a bright saying came to 
the tip of his tongue he did not hold it back. Some one 
has said : La Fontaine grew fables, Tallemant bore anec- 
dotes, Petrarch distilled sonnets, Piron sneezed epigrams. 
Sneeze was Piron's own word. Well, you can't hold 
back a sneeze." 3 Piron not only made epigrams through- 
out his life, he arranged to keep on making them after his 
death. "Voltaire, as long as I lived," he wrote, " hardly 
ventured to attack me. But I know him. The rogue is 
cowardly enough to insult me after I am gone, as he did 
my illustrious fellow-countryman, Crebillon. I have f ore- 
* seen his kindly intentions. Amongst my manuscripts is 
a little box containing a hundred and fifty epigrams in 
1 N. Lundis, vni, 128. * Ibid., vu, 463. 8 Ibid., 400. 



180 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

his honor. If, when I am no more, he breathes the 
slightest word against me, I direct my literary heir to 
send every week one of these epigrams to Ferney. This 
little supply thus husbanded will cheer up for three 
years the solitude of the respectable old gentleman dwell- 
ing in that canton." 1 

We are reminded of Victor Hugo and his ruling passion 
for making antitheses. He kept on making them all his 
life, his dying utterance was an antithesis (c J est le 
combat du jour et de la nuit\ and he arranged for an 
antithetical funeral. He was buried in the midst of 
almost unheard-of pomp and ceremony, but according 
to his own directions in a paupers' hearse. We find in 
Hugo not merely the practice but the theory of the 
master faculty. The genius, he would have us believe, 
is the man who cannot control himself. As regards his 
inspiration the great poet is like Mazeppa bound and 
helpless on the back of the courser that is bearing him 
headlong over the steppes. 2 Of Shakespeare in particular, 
Hugo says that he was " badly bridled on purpose by 
God, so that he might go soaring with free sweep of 
the wing through the infinite." One cannot help reflect- 
ing that this is also Taine's view of Shakespeare — except 
of course, that Taine does not put romantic unrestraint 

1 N. Lundis, vn, 463. 

a " Ainsi, lorsqu'un mortel, sur qui son dieu s'e'tale, 
S'est vu lier vivant sur ta croupe f atale, 

Ge*nie, ardent coursier, 
En vain il lutte, he'las ! tu bondis, tu Pemportes, 
Hors du monde re'el, dont tu brises les portes 
Avec tes pieds d'acier ! " 

(Les Orientates.) 



SAINTE-BEUVE 181 

under the immediate patronage of God. True human spon- 
taneity is shown, not in following, but in resisting im- 
pulse. By exalting the opposite type of spontaneity — 
the triumph of the unconscious and instinctive over 
the conscious and rational self — the Rousseauist plays 
directly into the hands of the determinist, another ex- 
ample of the perpetual irony that besets this form of 
romanticism. Taine bases on Michelet, one of the most 
spontaneous of all writers in the Rousseauistic sense, 
his assertion that "the human spirit is constructed as 
mathematically as a watch.' ' Indeed, no subject per- 
haps illustrates more clearly than this of the master 
faculty, the way in which science and Rousseauistic 
romanticism have cooperated during the last century in 
the dehumanizing of man. 

VIII 

Taine was largely influenced in his theory of the 
master faculty by Balzac who more perhaps than any 
other great creative writer of the century takes the de- 
terministic view. Characters not only appear in the 
pages of Balzac as the product of a highly complex en- 
vironment, but each one of his main characters tends 
to be the logical working out of a ruling passion. We 
have already seen that Sainte-Beuve himself cites one 
of the characters of Balzac in support of the master 
faculty. Yet right here we are to note that he diverges 
sharply from Balzac and those who, like him, are for 
carrying through the theory to the end. Theoretically 
Sainte-Beuve leaves us no choice, if we would avoid su- 



182 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

perficiality, between a purely naturalistic or else a purely 
theological attitude towards the master faculty. But in 
practice he refuses to be impaled on the horns of his 
own dilemma ; he prefers to remain in the " average de- 
gree of illusion known as common sense," or rather 
what gets the better of him is the humanistic dislike 
of extremes, naturalistic or other. If as a naturalist he 
believes in the master faculty, as a humanist he de- 
mands the balanced faculty, the faculty that is kept 
under control and tempered by its opposite. He attacks 
Balzac and the disciples of Balzac on this very point. 1 
He is ready enough to grant that a Piron was a mere 
machine for making epigrams, but not that the great 
writers of the world have been nothing more than sub- 
lime automatons and monomaniacs of genius. He had a 
naturalistic distrust of the power of the individual to 
put a check upon himself, and believed at the same time 
that art requires restraint. Here is in part the secret of 
the high regard he had during his later years for a 
critic like Boileau, who was a visible principle of au- 
thority and supplied the writers of his time with the 
curb they might not have found in themselves. Sainte- 
Beuve's judgment on Boileau is worth quoting, both 
from this point of view and as the homage of the great- 
est modern French critic to the chief representative of 
the older school of criticism : " Let us salute and ac- 
knowledge to-day the noble and mighty harmony of the 
grand siecle. Without Boileau, and without Louis XIV, 
who recognized Boileau as his Superintendent of Par- 

1 N. Lundis, x, 262. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 183 

nassus, what would have happened ? Would even the 
most talented have produced in the same degree what 
forms their surest heritage of glory ? Racine, I fear, 
would have written more plays like ' Berenice ' ; La Fon- 
taine fewer ' Fables ' and more ' Contes ' ; Moliere him- 
self would have run to ' Scapins,' and might not have 
attained to the austere eminence of i Le Misanthrope.' 
In a word, each of these fair geniuses would have 
abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, 
the common sense of the poet-critic authorized and con- 
firmed by that of a great king, constrained them and 
kept them, by the respect for his presence, to their bet- 
ter and graver tasks. And do you know what, in our 
days, has failed our poets, so strong at their beginning 
in native ability, so filled with promise and happy inspir- 
ation ? There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened 
monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each 
other. So it is these men of talent, seeing themselves 
in an age of anarchy and without discipline, have not 
hesitated to behave accordingly ; they have behaved, to 
be perfectly frank, not like exalted geniuses, or even 
like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We have 
seen the result." 

Sainte-Beuve is at his best in his insistence on the 
necessity of a balance of virtues in true greatness. The 
contrast is striking between his gentle and humane 
Shakespeare and the Shakespeare of Taine, who is an 
unchained force of nature, " the most immoderate of 
all violators of language." In the following passage 
taken from his address on " Tradition in Literature " 1 

1 Lundis, xv, 356 ff. 



184 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Sainte-Beuve appears in his happiest vein as a humanist : 
" But great men of letters have appeared, you will say, 
quite outside of the classical tradition. Name them. I 
know only one such who is indeed very great, Shake- 
speare: and are you very sure that he is entirely 
outside the tradition ? Had n't he read Plutarch and 
Montaigne, those copious repertories, or rather those re- 
serve hives of antiquity, in which so much honey has 
been stored? Admirable poet and doubtless the most 
natural since Homer, though in so different a way. . . . 
Oh, it is not to you that I need to say that this man so 
thoroughly human was not a savage or of disordered 
mind, and that we must not confuse him because at 
times he was over-energetic or over-subtle — because he 
fell into the rudeness or excess of refinement of his time 
— with the eccentric and the madmen full of them- 
selves, drunk with their own nature and their own 
works, drunk with their own wine. If we saw him ap- 
pear of a sudden and enter in person, I imagine him to 
myself as noble and humane of aspect, having nothing 
of the bull, the wild boar, or even of the lion ; bearing 
on his countenance, like Moliere, the noblest features of 
the species and those which speak most immediately to 
the mind and soul. I imagine him moderate, sensible of 
speech, and most often (through pity or indulgence) 
smiling and gentle. For he too has created beings of 
ravishing purity and gentleness, and he dwells in the 
very centre of human nature. Is it not in him that we 
must seek the most expressive phrase to render gentle- 
ness itself — 'the milk of human kindness' — that qual- 



SAINTE-BEUVE 185 

ity which I always require energetic talents to mingle 
with their strength so that they may not fall into harsh- 
ness and brutal offensiveness, just as I require of talents 
who incline too much to gentleness that there be min- 
gled with them a little of what Pliny and Lucian 
called bitterness, the salt and seasoning of strength : 
for it is thus that talents become complete : and Shake- 
speare in his way, and save for the faults of his age, was 
complete. Be reassured, gentlemen, great men of every 
kind, and especially I will say those who are great in 
the order of the intellect, are never madmen or barba- 
rians. If any writer appears to us in his behavior and 
in all his personality violent, unreasonable, offensive to 
good sense, and the most natural proprieties, he may 
have talent (for talent, a great talent, is compatible with 
many faults), but be sure that he is not a writer of the 
first quality and the first mark in humanity. Homer at 
times nods ; Corneille in conversation is heavy and nods ; 
La Fontaine nods ; they have fits of f orgetf ulness and 
absent-mindedness. But the greatest of men are never 
extravagant, ridiculous, grotesque, pretentious, boast- 
ful, cynical, constantly violating decorum. As for me, 
however much I may allow for the individual varieties 
and peculiarities of human nature, I will never imagine 
to myself the revered choir of the five or six great men 
of letters and creative geniuses of whom humanity 
boasts and who after all can be only the five or six first 
gentlemen of the world, as a mere gang or pack of men 
beside themselves, as monomaniacs each one rushing 
headlong for his prey. No, tradition tells us this, and 



186 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the consciousness of our own civilized nature tells us so 
even more plainly, reason always must preside, and does 
preside at last even among these favorites and elect of 
the imagination." * 

Sainte-Beuve thus manages to get both the truth and 
the counter-truth uttered on the subject of the master 
faculty, but with some sacrifice of coherency. In this 
respect he is like Emerson who says that there is " no 
adaptation or universal applicability in men but each 
has his special talent. . . . We do what we must and 
call it by the best names we can " ; and then goes on to 
declare elsewhere that " the differences in men are not 
organic." Emerson's incoherency, however, is due to a 
certain looseness and lack of mental grip in linking 
a genuine faith in human liberty with the observed 
facts. The incoherency of Sainte-Beuve, who had a 
tremendous grip on the facts, is due rather to a final 
absence of definite conviction, though he had a strong 
leaning as we have seen towards the materialistic side. 
After reviewing the various beliefs, naturalistic and the- 
ological, on the freedom of the will, he concludes as 
follows : " How many contrasts and oppositions \ Before 
this sea of human opinions as on the brink of an ocean 
I wonder at the ebb and flow. Who will tell me the 
law of it all?" 2 

His skepticism, I believe, goes deeper than the vari- 
ous efforts of his time to unify reality merely through 
the intellect or the emotions. He saw all that was im- 
plied in the weakening of traditional standards in litera- 

1 Lundis, xv, 366 ff. 2 Port-Royal, I, 409. 



SAINTE-BEUVE 187 

ture and religion, he saw the approach of the " great 
confusion " ; 1 at the same time he was too clear-sighted 
really to warm up to the new religions that were of- 
fered as substitutes for the disciplines of the past. The 
underlying method in all these nineteenth-century at- 
tempts at religion — whether it be the religion of Pas- 
sion, or the religion of Beauty, or the religion of Science, 
or the religion of Humanity — is always the same : to 
take some element of human nature that is immensely 
important, indeed, but still secondary, and then try to 
exalt it to the supreme and central place. We must real- 
ize the completeness of Sainte-Beuve' s detachment from 
every form of faith, new or old, if we are to penetrate 
to the last desolate depth of his inner life (jusqu'aufond 
desole du gouffre interieur). "The only unity I am 
ambitious of," he writes, "is that of comprehending 
everything." 2 But mere comprehension is not in itself a 
principle of unity at all, but rather of dispersion. In 
aiming at nothing beyond comprehension, Sainte-Beuve 
was destined to become, as some one called him, the 
Wandering Jew of the intellectual world. It is not un- 
natural that he should have suffered from the " absence 
of fixed pole and centre," and sought an escape from 
the "void that mined his breast" in unremitting toil. 

The world, as the Latin adage has it, wishes to be de- 
ceived ( Vult mundns decipi). On the negative side, 
therefore, the function of the critic is to keep mankind, 
so far as possible and in spite of its natural proclivity, 
from being devoured by charlatans. Sainte-Beuve pos- 
1 Port, lit., m, 550. * Port-Royal, m, 589. 



188 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

sessed in an eminent degree the wisdom of disillusion 
needful for the performance of this task. Few men have 
practised with more success the art of not being taken 
in ; and this in an age, as he himself points out, of false 
religions, that is of false unifications of life and so of 
charlatanry. 1 " My Lucretian view of criticism," he says, 
"is not gay, but it is better than the worship of idols." 
But though comparatively free from the illusions of 
his time, he had in the fullest measure its virtues. He 
is likely to be looked on more and more, in M. France's 
phrase, as the universal doctor, the Saint Thomas 
Aquinas of the nineteenth century ; not as the greatest 
man of the century, but possibly as the most representa- 
tive, the one who embodied most completely its aspira- 
tion towards horizontality, its magnificent widening out 
of knowledge and sympathy, and, some would add, its 
lack of adequate central aim. That so shrewd an ob- 
server as Sainte-Beuve could find no firm anchorage for 
the spirit in the movements peculiar to this century may 
in the long run turn out to be not to his discredit, but 
to the discredit of the century. It may become apparent 
that something was omitted in the whole nineteenth cen- 
tury view of life and that this something is the keystone 
of the arch. 

1 " Ce dix-neuvieme siecle, qui sera repute* en grande partie le siecle 
du charlatanisme litte'raire, humanitaire, eclectique, neocatholique," etc. 
(N. Lundis, v, 253). 



VII 

SCHERER 

Perhaps what first strikes one about Scherer is the 
contrast between his solid merit as a critic and his lack 
of popularity in France either during his life or since. 
No volume of his critical studies ever went into a second 
edition, and some of the volumes are already out of 
print. He was not even a member of the Academy, 
though more in sympathy with its aims than almost any 
other important writer of the day. The natural inference 
is that he was in certain respects out of touch with his 
time and environment. Scherer himself took pleasure in 
recalling that he was born in Paris on the Boulevard 
cjes Italiens; but he was far from being a typical 
Parisiar^fr even a typical Frenchman. In the first place, 
he was not predisposed to the French point of view by 
his ancestry. His father was of German-Swiss origin. 
His grandfather on his mother's side was English, his 
grandmother Dutch. He lived in England some time as 
a youth and thus acquired a perfect command of Eng- 
lish as well as developed his hereditary leaning towards 
England, a leaning that appears most clearly, perhaps, in 
his love of liberty in contrast with the French passion 
for equality. Later he resided for several years at Stras- 
burg, and became deeply versed in German literature 
and scholarship, especially in the "higher criticism." 
He also had a thorough knowledge of Italian. He was, 



190 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

in short, probably the most accomplished cosmopolitan 
of his time, admirable in his power to combine general 
ideas with broad and accurate information. 

But if he was at least half a native in England and 
Germany, he was half a foreigner in Paris. The differ- 
ence between his outlook and that of a Frenchman, of 
which one is so conscious, is a matter of religion even 
more perhaps than of heredity. It is as important to re- 
member in his case that he was an emancipated clergy- 
man as it is in the case of Renan that he had studied 
for the Catholic priesthood. We might apply in part to 
Scherer himself what he says of Alexandre Vinet, who 
influenced him so deeply : " The French language is 
Catholic, like the French nation, like French literature, 
and one may inquire whether a Protestant, in whatever 
circumstances he may be placed, ever loses entirely in 
his thoughts and manner of writing the stamp of his 
origin." 1 One can feel in Scherer' s style, a!* Sainte- 
Beuve says you can in that of Vinet, a certain theolog- 
ical chill. It is indeed natural that a man who was a 
professional theologian to the age of forty-five should, 
even after giving up theology, have retained a severe 
moral reserve. It is equally inevitable that literary Paris 
should have looked on him in some degree as an out- 
sider. There is a certain symbolic value in the account 
the Goncourts give of the way he held himself aloof at 
the Magny dinners (Scherer, epouvante et regardant 
la table du haut de son pince-nez). 2 On one occasion, 

1 Etudes, i, 281. Cf. also ibid., 279. 
8 Journal des Goncourts, 22 June, 1863. 



SCHERER 191 

the Goncourts relate, as the guests were preparing to 
depart, Gautier went up to Scherer, the mutest person 
in the company, and said to him, " Come now, I hope 
you will improve the first opportunity to compromise 
yourself ; for we are all compromising ourselves and it 
is not fair that you should remain among us as a cold 
observer. ,, * 

Scherer had the instincts not merely of a Protestant 
but of a puritan. He came out, for example, as a heretic 
in his article on Moliere (" Une heresie litteraire "), and 
his reason for protesting against the established ortho- 
doxy was that Moliere falls too far short of purity in his 
diction. 2 Scherer protests against those who were cor- 
rupting the purity of French speech in his own time, 
with a warmth that would no doubt have reminded Mo- 
liere himself of Alceste : " A superficial culture which 
has lost the sentiment of the right use of terms, and a 
need of over-refinement which wishes to innovate at any 
price, such are the principal agents in the corruption of 
this magnificent language, which three centuries of great 
writers had brought to a degree of incomparable perfec- 
tion. ... I read recently in a newspaper that c un crime 
venait de s'accomplir dans des conditions d'atrocite 
inouie? Can you imagine, my dear friend, the mental 
state of a man who can write such a phrase ! To come 
to such a pass must he not have been pretty completely 
abandoned by both gods and men ! And has n't every- 
body the right to exclaim in the speech of Voltaire that 

1 Ibid., 20 July, 1863. 

3 SeeBrunetiere's reply, La languede Moliere {Etudes critiques } vu } &5&). 



192 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

there are not enough floutings, not enough foolscaps, 
not enough pillories in France for such rascallions." x 



Some of the very traits in Scherer, however, that are 
unrepresentative of the narrower environment make him 
representative in a larger way. " Scherer," says M. Gre- 
ard, " belongs to the small number of those who will bear 
witness before posterity to the crises that human thought 
traversed in the nineteenth century." 2 If Scherer' s 
life is thus typical, it is because it exhibits witlTspecial 
acuteness the central conflict of the century between 
science and faith. He had begun by granting nothing 
to the new critical spirit, by a belief in the literal inspi- 
ration of the Bible, and ended by granting the new 
spirit everything. The creed he had held absolutely 
came, with his acceptance of the historical method, to 
seem purely relative ; what he had taken to have outer 
reality appeared a mere emanation of the mind, not, in 
short, objective but subjective. It was not surprising 
that Scherer regarded this distinction between objective 
and subjective as having been of more moment to the 
world than the discovery of America. 3 

Scherer's use of this and similar distinctions suggests 
his obligations to German thought. As a matter of fact 
he was one of those who did the most to make certain 
aspects of this thought known in France during the 
second half of the century. His article on Hegel in 
the "Kevue des Deux Mondes " in 1861, which marked 

1 Etudes, v, 379. 2 Edmond Scherer, 4. 8 Etudes, vm, p. xii. 



SCHERER 193 

his emergence as a critic, was probably the most in- 
fluential he ever wrote. The essential idea which he 
took from Hegel and other Germans was that of de- 
velopment. " The universe," he says in the preface to 
his first volume of literary essays, " is only the eternal 
flux of things ; and the same holds of the true, the good 
and the beautiful as of the rest : they do not exist, they 
are made; they are less the purpose or goal towards 
which humanity tends than the mobile resultant of the 
efforts of all men and all centuries." " Hegel," he wrote 
in the article of 1861, " has taught us the respect and 
intelligence of the facts. Through him we know that 
what is has the right to be. . . . Hence a powerful 
method of study and criticism. . . . We no longer make 
the world over in our image ; on the contrary, we allow 
ourselves to be modified and fashioned by it. . . . In 
the eyes of the modern savant everything is true, every- 
thing is well in its place ; the place of every truth con- 
stitutes its truth. The structure of the old world rested 
on faith in the absolute. Religion, ethics, literature, 
everything bore the stamp of this notion. Men knew 
only two causes — that of God and the Devil ; two camps 
among men, the good and the wicked ; two places in 
eternity, the right and the left of the judge. Error was 
all on one side ; truth all on the other. Nowadays no- 
thing is any longer for us either truth or error ; we no 
longer know religion, but religions ; not morality, but 
manners ; not principles, but facts. What a marvellous 
understanding of the past we have in consequence ! How 
it lives again before our eyes ! The affiliations of peoples, 



194 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the advance of civilizations, the character of different 
times, the genius of languages, the sense of mythologies, 
the inspiration of national poetries, the essence of reli- 
gions, are so many revelations due to modern science. 
... As is our science so is our aesthetic. It prefers to 
contemplate and study rather than judge. ... It has 
given up the barren method which consists in opposing 
one form of beauty to another, in preferring, in exclud- 
ing. It bears with everything. It is vast as the world, 
tolerant as nature. . . . It is of the very essence of things 
that a truth is complete only in so far as its contrary is 
introduced into it ; that one assertion is no truer than 
an opposite assertion and always ends in a contradiction, 
to rise afterwards to a higher conciliation ; that the pre- 
sent fact has only a fugitive reality ; a reality that con- 
sists in its disappearance as well as in its appearance, a 
reality that is produced to be denied as soon as affirmed. 
It is therefore not enough to say: everything is only 
relative ; we must add : everything is only relation. The 
true is not true in itself ; there is no definitive truth. . . . 
The only equitable and useful judgment you can pass 
upon systems, is the judgment they pronounce upon 
themselves by their transformations," etc. 

It would, in short, be hard to imagine a more thorough 
relativist than Scherer. Truth and reality for him are 
entirely implicated in the flux. They are not anterior to 
the facts but are the progressive outcome of them. This 
extremely pluralistic view of truth associated him with a 
certain type of scientific positivist in his own time and 
would to-day associate him with the pragmatists. If he 



SCHERER 195 

had lived in the Middle Ages he would have been a 
strict nominalist. No one devoted keener logic than he 
to proving that life is not logical, that all attempts to 
unify it intellectually are vain. The absolute in this 
sense is a metaphysical illusion. The attempt of the mind 
to set up a theory of itself is equally illusory. It is as 
though a man should look out of a window in order to 
see himself pass by in the street. 

One form of the metaphysical illusion, as it seemed to 
him, was the proneness to erect certain words into a sort 
of absolute, and to render them mystical homage. He 
assailed this illusion not only in its past forms, but in 
the forms it was assuming in his own day (and here we 
have an additional ground for his unpopularity). In the 
preface to the eighth volume of his "Etudes," sometimes 
called his literary testament, he makes an attack of this 
kind on the word Humanity. He sees in this word merely 
" one of those abstractions which meet our incurable needs 
for mysticism." We have a family and city and friends 
and kin, but that does not suffice ; we widen out the re- 
lationship which is already unsubstantial, until we embrace 
the whole genus homo, which we proceed to personify, 
speaking of it only with emotion and raising hymns in its 
honor. "We shed ink upon the altars of this personifica- 
tion, — ink and sometimes blood. . . . In the great ship- 
wreck of belief, we have carried over to this conception all 
our needs of faith and love. Nay more, it was Comte him- 
self, the founder of positivism, who undertook to make of 
Humanity an object of worship. We have rid the world 
of theology and metaphysics and yet remain the sport of 



196 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

a word." As he looks over the races of the world, Scherer 
is led to ask irreverently whether the Goddess Humanity 
does not often have a strange resemblance to a monkey. 
" It is possibly very wrong of me that I am thus consti- 
tuted. I am fundamentally a nominalist. Humanity means 
nothing for me. Where do you see this humanity ? Where 
do you find it? Even among men and women I meet, 
how many are there that I feel no need to know more 
intimately! I cannot wonder enough at the power of 
abstraction of people who in the overflow of their sympa- 
thies forget the ugly, the stupid and the vulgar, and 
leave out of account the vicious, the vile and the atrocious. 
You would n't shake hands with this man : nevertheless, 
he 's a brother. You send him to jail, you cut off his 
head : always brother ! " 

Scherer would escape from the mesh of illusion in which 
we are imprisoned by the word. He would get rid of all 
illusions and gaze on the truth in its nakedness.. "It 
seems to me," he says in his Literary Testament, " as I 
look back upon my life that I have simply experienced 
a certain passion for getting at the bottom of things 
(voir les choses dans leur fond)." But perhaps the at- 
tempt to get at the bottom of things in this sense, that 
is, to see them stripped of all their veils of illusion, is 
itself an intellectualist error. Illusion, as Joubert says 
profoundly, is an integral part of reality. If you leave out 
illusion, you see the fact or " law " in a hard isolation 
and not in its mysterious interconnection with the whole. 
In this way you arrive at the false disillusion of the de- 
cadent who sees not only in the outer world, but in him- 



SCHERER 197 

self, nothing but phenomena and phenomenal relation- 
ships, who has no countervailing intuition of the One to 
oppose to his perception of the Many. The highest wis- 
dom, according to Scherer, is illusion that knows itself 
illusion ; and he would have us believe that there is a 
strange and horrible joy in thus recognizing the final 
inanity of all. 1 But we have the testimony of Greard 
that Scherer never seemed so sad as when celebrating 
the joys of disenchantment. 2 

Scherer reminds us almost inevitably here of Amiel, 
and he is only consistent in proclaiming the deep wisdom 
and sublime poetry of AmieFs speculations about illusion 
and disillusion, Maya and the Great Wheel — all that 
portion of the " Journal In time " that Arnold so shrewdly 
set down as pathological. Scherer, however, was at one 
with Arnold as to the practical unprofitableness of such 
speculations. He regarded as highly beneficent the in- 
stincts that keep man from looking too fixedly at in- 
soluble problems. " We must," he says, " avoid coming 
to too close quarters with life. It is a slender crust over 
which you must walk without bearing down too hard. 
Hit your heel into it and you make a hole in which you 
will disappear. True philosophy has never consisted in 
probing all problems, but often on the contrary in elud- 
ing them. We are skirting the abyss : beware of vertigo." 
Scherer did instinctively what Arnold regretted Amiel 
did not do : he escaped the vertigo of the abyss by turn- 
ing literary critic. 

1 Etudes, vn, 36. 2 Edmond Scherer, 155. 



198 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

n 

Scherer may indeed be regarded as a middle term 
between Amiel and Arnold. 1 All three men were pre- 
occupied in a somewhat similar way with the religious 
problem. All three had suffered from the noblest form 
of the malady of the age, the feeling of emptiness that 
ensues upon the loss of faith, the desolateness of the 
man who is suspended between two worlds, — one dead, 
the other powerless to be born. Though Scherer did 
not, like Amiel, suffer a paralysis of the will as the 
result of this divided allegiance, he exhibits its ravages 
in other ways at least as acutely. At twenty, as he tells 
us, he had undergone conversion, he had caught a 
glimpse of " that ideal of a pure and holy life which, 
when it has once appeared, takes possession of all the 
powers of one's being." And then supervened the sci- 
entific conception which reduces everything to natural 
history. " In spite of its protest, religion is comprised, 
like everything else, in the knowledge of nature. That 
is the point I reached at forty." 2 Arnold had not con- 
ceded so much to faith at twenty as did Scherer, and 
conceded far less to science at forty. He would not, 

1 I speak later of Arnold's tribute to Scherer. He must in turn have 
felt satisfaction when he read passages like the following: "C'est un 
repos d'ouvrir les livres (de M. Arnold) lorsqu'on vient de lire ceur des 
grands manieristes dont s'enorgueillit si a tort la litterature de nos voi- 
sins : Carlyle au jargon conscient, voulu, calculd; Ruskin et ses affecta- 
tions de profondeur, sa laborieuse recherche d'expression, toutes ces poses 
e'tudie'es d'un charlatanisme qu'on regrette de voir allie* parf ois a un me'- 
rite re'el, et qui constituent un peone* contre le vrai serieux et le grand 
gout." (Etudes, vh, 5.) 

2 Etudes, ix, 221. 



SCHERER 199 

like Scherer, have lumped together as subjective every- 
thing that did not conform to the standards of scientific 
truth; he would not, for example, have granted that 
the Sermon on the Mount is subjective in the same 
sense as Lamartine's poetry. To Scherer' s contention 
that religion ventre comme tout le reste dans la con- 
naissance de la nature, he would have replied : — 

" Man hath all which nature hath, but more, 
And in that more lie all his hopes of good." 

Arnold's view of life, in short, was not entirely stoical, 
but at least partly humanistic. He was inferior to Scherer 
in logical vigor and breadth of knowledge, but superior 
to him in instinctive good sense. Then, too, he was con- 
soled, as Scherer was not, by visitations of the Muse. 
There were moments when, in his own phrase, he breathed 
immortal air, though he never mounts, as Tennyson does 
at times, to the purely religious intuitions. Scherer 
moved freely in the moral world, Joubert would have 
said, "but not in that other world that is above it." 
One is therefore led to surmise that his earlier faith was 
a mixture of theology and romantic religiosity. It is 
indeed as important in his case to study the relation- 
ship to Lamartine as it is in the case of Arnold to 
study the relationship to Senancour. Scherer looks on 
Lamartine as a true idealist; which means in practice 
that he confuses religion with romantic longing. He 
contrasts this idealism with the flat-footed and prosaic 
spirit of his contemporaries and yet concludes that his 
contemporaries are right after all. The faith in the in- 
invisible and the infinite was merely an incident in the 



200 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

romantic youth of the world, with its ignorance and its 
illusion, but also with its victorious charm. But the 
world has matured and bid adieu to its youthful dreams. 
The net result of the effort of its prime will be an in- 
creasing comfort with an increasing vulgarity. 1 

Romantic disillusion thus played an enormous role 
in Scherer' s conversion to scientific positivism. We have 
seen that Sainte-Beuve's attempt to rest religious faith 
on treacherous romantic foundations had ended in a 
somewhat similar disillusion. It was appropriate there- 
fore that Scherer should have chosen Sainte-Beuve as 
his master when he broke definitely with his theological 
past, and that Sainte-Beuve should have been the first 
to proclaim Scherer's intellectual distinction. Scherer 
not only had a genuine cult for Sainte-Beuve (he always 
worked with his bust before him), but he was in some 
respects, more than Taine and others who had a similar 
cult, a genuine disciple. Like Sainte-Beuve he had the 
thoroughness and accuracy that we associate with the best 
type of investigator, but, like Sainte-Beuve and unlike 
many modern scholars, he loved letters for their own sake 
and not merely as a corpus vile for investigation. Sainte- 
Beuve seemed to him a vanishing type, one of the last 
of the humanists (soyons les derniers des delicats, as 
Sainte-Beuve himself had said). "And now we must 
take leave of him," Scherer wrote immediately after 
Sainte-Beuve' s death, " take leave of this lucid intelli- 
gence, this marvellous writer, this charming talker, this 
indulgent friend. . . . Happy if the melancholy antici- 

1 Etudes, ix, 287. 



SCHERER 201 

pations natural at such a moment do not come true. 
Happy if the death of a man who has occupied so great 
a place in our literature is not at the same time the end 
of a literary epoch; if delicacy and taste, deprived to- 
day of their last representative, are not destined to dis- 
appear with him : if the royalty of letters is not destined 
like other royalties to give place to general mediocrity 
and violent procedures. I frequently had the impres- 
sion that Sainte-Beuve himself, towards the end, felt 
that he was a stranger in the midst of the new tenden- 
cies ; and it is inevitable, perhaps, when you lose a man 
like him, to imagine that everything is ended when 
everything is only being transformed." 1 

In a sense Scherer' s literary criticism, though it has 
a strong moral and philosophical tinge, is truer to the 
type than Sainte-Beuve' s ; it does not, like his, melt al- 
most insensibly into biography and history and science. 
Moreover Scherer resembled Arnold rather than Sainte- 
Beuve, in being interested in the general more than in 
the particular. The difference in temper between Sainte- 
Beuve and Scherer is, of course, striking. " What he has 
not as a critic," says Arnold of Scherer, " is Sainte- 
Beuve' s elasticity and cheerfulness. He has not that 
gaiety, that radiancy, as of a man discharging with de- 
light the very office to which he was born, which in the 
1 Causeries ' make Sainte-Beuve's touch so felicitous, his 
sentences so crisp, his effect so charming." Scherer is less 
light-hearted as a critic than Arnold himself, who has 
even been accused at times of jauntiness. The reason is 
1 Etudes, rv, 111. 



202 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

perhaps that Arnold had found an outlet for his roman- 
tic disillusion in his poetry. Sainte-Beuve had not only 
effected a similar purgation of the malady of the age 
in his own verse, but there were other reasons why he 
found the process of adjustment to the new order less 
painful than did Scherer. Sainte-Beuve was afflicted as 
a humanist and honnete homme, by certain modern de- 
velopments, but did not retain, after the loss of his ro- 
mantic religiosity, an undue moral severity (quite the 
contrary). Furthermore he had in him a strong plebeian 
element that, in spite of his radical distrust of human na- 
ture, inclined him at times towards the humanitarian 
hope. Scherer was not merely a stern moralist, but tem- 
peramentally an aristocrat, who drew back with a proud 
patrician gesture (potius mori quam fcedari) from 
that growing democratic commonness in which intel- 
lectually he acquiesced. 

in 

This clash between the head and the heart which ap- 
pears so often in Scherer and so poignantly, is pre- 
cisely what gives to his life that representative value of 
which M. Greard speaks. At one moment Scherer ex- 
ults over the doctrine of relativity, at another he ex- 
claims, " No, I am not made for an epoch of universal 
transformation like ours ; my sympathies are with the 
past ; and yet I feel that there is in human affairs a cer- 
tain declivity that you cannot reascend. And so I see 
myself carried away by my intellectual convictions to- 
wards a future that inspires in me neither interest nor 



SCHERER 203 

confidence." People were naturally disconcerted when 
they saw Scherer stand forth intellectually as a modern 
of moderns and at the same time turn away in disdain 
from everything distinctively modern. Most men have 
given their allegiance to the new order not by a process 
of cool reasoning, but by an act of faith. Scherer, how- 
ever, showed the same " sad lucidity of soul " in deal- 
ing with the new faith that he had shown in dealing 
with the old. We have already seen how he disposes of 
the word Humanity ; he is no less merciless in expos- 
ing the illusions that have clustered round the word 
Progress. So far from making a religion of progress, 
so far from believing that the world is moving towards 
" some far-off divine event," he believes rather, as we 
have seen, that it is moving towards general mediocrity, 
with an increase of material comfort for the masses. In- 
dustrial and scientific progress he grants is possible, 
since each new invention or discovery becomes the point 
of departure for further conquests. The error begins 
when we transfer what is true of the practical and pos- 
itive order to the world of moral values ; when we sup- 
pose that society increases in uprightness, equity, mod- 
eration, modesty, delicacy of feeling by a necessary 
evolution and an automatic development. And this 
error comes in turn from another which is the con- 
fusion of comfort with happiness, whereas comfort is 
at most but one of the conditions of happiness. Happi- 
ness is, above all, a state of the soul, so that you may 
be happy with few enjoyments, and miserable in the lap 
of luxury. Rightly understood, therefore, progress can 



204 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

assure the happiness of no one, still less promise that 
of mankind. Progress may even work counter to happi- 
ness which is a product of wisdom, and wisdom in turn 
presupposes an intellectual culture more refined than is 
compatible in all appearances with the levelling process 
of democracy. 1 

Democracy, as Scherer uses the term, means of course 
not the love of a well-ordered liberty, but what it has 
meant practically in modern France, the passion for 
equality. We can possibly, as I have pointed out, see the 
working of heredity in his own estimate of the relative 
value of freedom and equality. He saw an ironical con- 
trast between the efforts that had been made to bring 
about democracy of the French type and the resultant 
dead level of platitude. " So be it. The world at this 
rate will resemble some day the plain of Saint-Denis. 
And to think how many outcries and writings it will 
have cost, how much ink and blood, enthusiasm and 
sacrifices, to realize this ideal ! " The future of human- 
ity, he surmises, will be something like a bee-hive or ant- 
hill, — regularity, uniformity, platitudinous happiness, 
life less everything that makes lif e worth while. 2 Euro- 
pean society seems to him destined to push on in the 
pathway of narrow and superficial logic until this logic 
is shattered against the very nature of things, against 
the inequalities of strength and worth that distinguish 
men, against the instincts and needs that create private 
property, against the necessity that is imposed upon 
society to organize itself in order to live, and to this 

1 Etudes, vra, pp. viii-ix. 2 Etudes, v, 317. 



SCHERER 205 

end to accept the necessary subordinations. 1 Republi- 
can France with its dreams of equality is more Catholic 
than it imagines since it is still engaged in the quest of 
the absolute. It has concentrated upon a chimera all 
the powers of idealism that formerly found expression 
in religion. 2 " Our generation is pursuing a mirage 
vainer than that of the desert, absolute equality and 
universal felicity. " 3 " Let us not forget that the masses 
are idealistic. They refuse to recognize the most thor- 
oughly established facts when they themselves are the 
victims of them. They are accustomed in the simplicity 
of their political ignorance to consider institutions as 
capable of remedying everything, human nature as 
capable of adjusting itself to all experiments. There has 
thus grown up little by little a social situation singu- 
larly critical." 4 

Since the masses are necessarily idealistic, the only 
hope would seem to be to oppose to the chimeras of the 
pseudo-idealists a true idealism. All Scherer himself has 
to oppose to these chimeras is a cold disillusion. 

IV 

With such a view of democracy, Scherer, so far from 
believing in progress, evidently inclined to the opposite 
belief. Towards the end especially he was haunted by 
the idea of decadence. He was prone to bestow almost 
exaggerated praise upon writers who, in the midst of 
the growing commonness, still displayed delicacy and 

1 Etudes, x, 240. * Ibid., 55. 

8 Ibid., 19. ' Ibid., 274. 



206 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

reserve, even if these qualities were not accompanied by 
sufficient strength — writers, for example like Doudan, 
Fromentin, Montegut, Weiss. He cites the enormities 
of Zola as an example of the influence of the mob on 
literary standards, and as we have already seen, dis- 
covers a similar symptom in what is known nowadays 
as la crise dufrangais. " It is possible," he says, "that 
all these pollutions are only a passing effect of the trend 
towards equality, of a levelling process that has sub- 
merged only for a time the delicacy of men's minds and 
the polish of their manners." l " But if this were not 
so, if democracy really meant the abolishment of what 
used to be called the scholar and gentleman (honnete 
homme) one would have reason to ask what can result 
from an art without decency and a society without 
shame." " Former literatures that perished yielded in 
part to the shock of barbarians. Is that the fate in 
store for us, and will democracy play the role of the 
barbarians?" 2 He expresses a doubt whether French 
literature can long maintain itself in such an extreme 
of debauchery and imbecility. 

Scherer protests as a humanist against this cheapening 
and lowering of literature, but his humanism, like that 
of Sainte-Beuve or that of any one whose own philo- 
sophy does not rise above the naturalistic level, is too 
much a matter of taste and not enough a matter of 
standards and discipline. " Taste," he says, " is toil that 
conceals itself, and we applaud only ostentatious arti- 
fice. It is delicacy, and we worship strength. It is meas- 

1 Etudes, x, 330. 2 Etudes, ix, 347. 



SCHERER 207 

ure, and we prostrate ourselves before everything that 
is unmeasured. Formerly the pencil was never light 
enough, now it gouges a hole through the paper. Ex- 
pression is no longer addressed to the spirit, but to the 
senses. The greatest writer is the one who has at his 
disposition the widest and most daring vocabulary. M. 
Zola speaks like a man convinced that he has the public 
with him ; nay, more, like a man who is convinced that 
he is inaugurating a new art. Unhappily I am not far 
from thinking so too. I expressed a belief when Sainte- 
Beuve died that something was ending with him. That 
something was literature in the old sense, the preoccupa- 
tion with what is noble and elevated, fine and delicate, the 
quest for truth in thought, and measure in expression ; 
in short, what has been called hitherto literary taste 
and the art of writing. All that appeared to me deeply 
compromised, and I confess that what has taken place 
since has not contributed to make me change my opin- 
ion. Literature is in a way to disappear, or if you pre- 
fer, to be transformed. Language is changing visibly. 
There is still orthography in books and newspapers be- 
cause there are still compositors to put it there, but 
there is no longer any grammar. As for the choice of 
subjects, people prefer violent ones and get what they 
desire. Highly spiced dishes are needed to awaken the 
coarse senses of the masses, the jaded palates of the 
over-refined, the intellectual apathy of all; and numer- 
ous writers are found to provide the necessary stimu- 
lants. All this is proclaimed progress, the literature of 
the future. As to the future, that is possible ; I know 



208 MODERN FKENCH CRITICISM 

nothing about it. But progress ? That is precisely the 
point at issue." 1 

Scherer sums up his worst apprehensions in the phrase : 
Nous allons a V americanisme. 2 Certain of the perversions 
against which he directs his diatribes have plainly very 
little to do with democratic commonness, the baleful 
process of Americanization. There is surely a difference 
between the lack of distinction that may fairly be asso- 
ciated with a certain type of democracy and the perver- 
sions of over-refinement, though both presuppose a break- 
ing down of the standards of the honnete homme. The 
perversions of over-refinement should be connected rather 
with the general literary development of the century, 
especially with the romantic movement. Scherer's atti- 
tude towards the romantic movement needs rather careful 
defining. He himself, as I have tried to show, is closely re- 
lated to one side of this movement, to the elegiac and 
emotional side that appears, for example, in the poetry 
of Lamartine. But there is another side of the movement 
that is not primarily elegiac and emotional, but pictorial 
and descriptive, a side, according to Scherer, entirely 
different from the other. We may grant him that the two 
sides are distinct but not that they are radically sepa- 
rated. At any rate his sympathy for romantic writers 
diminished in exact proportion as they ceased to express 
that infinite longing of the heart that he associated with 
religion, and as they became pictorial. He has only dis- 
approval for the more advanced forms of romantic word 
painting, that would have language overstep its natural 

1 Etudes, vii, 194-95. a Ibid., iv, 22. 



SCHERER 209 

boundaries even at the risk of being emptied of its 
intellectual content. Description seemed to him to over- 
top thought in Hugo, and he grants him at best per- 
functory praise. For Gautier, who approaches still closer 
to descriptive virtuosity, he has a disdain that he does 
not attempt to conceal. Of all writers that ever lived 
Gautier was " the most foreign to any lofty conception 
of art as well as to any virile use of the pen." * How 
can one fail to be struck, says Scherer, at the place de- 
scription has taken in contemporary letters! "When 
you hear a page in a book praised, or you are told of 
a newcomer that he has talent, you may be sure in 
advance that this kind of virtuosity is meant. The 
manifest reason is that a writer may be brainless and 
yet endowed with the eye that sees forms and the hand 
that reproduces them." 2 

Scherer, however, reserves his supreme contempt for 
the writers who not only reduce literature to the quest 
of sensation but of morbid sensation at that. Now among 
the writers of this kind who connect the older romanti- 
cism with the so-called decadent movement, Baudelaire 
is probably the chief. Baudelaire, and the cult of Baude- 
laire, seem to Scherer to sum up everything in the age 
that tended towards degeneracy. Whenever he touches 
on this topic he becomes vitriolic. "Baudelaire," he 
says, " gave me the feeling of decadence, and revealed 
to me the nature of it. I had always supposed it was an 
empty word by which old men condemned works foreign 
to their habits. I had said to myself that everything is 

1 Etudes, VIII, pp. xxi-xxii. 2 Ibid., pp. xix-xx. 



210 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

relative; that every period has its language and litera- 
ture; that this language and literature are good by the 
very fact that they express the thoughts of men at a 
moment in the life of society. But no, there is in the 
human spirit an old age as well as a youth; there is 
senility after virility, a moment when the intelligence 
weakens, speech grows thick and forms become distorted ; 
a time when instead of being beautiful, supple, and 
strong, one becomes ugly, driveling and impotent. To 
question this fact you would have to begin by abolish- 
ing the distinction between beauty and ugliness. It is 
true that is just what the Baudelaires are busy doing." 
"When once in the arts you begin to pursue sensation, 
you want sensation at any price. After beauty, ugli- 
ness ; after the shapely, the misshapen. If we can't 
charm you, we can make you shudder. . . . The same 
thing happens as with drunkards, who in order to ex- 
cite their jaded palates gulp down raw spirits; as with 
the Marquis de Sade, who seasoned voluptuousness with 
cruelty. And there is no reason why all this should end. 
The terrible once exhausted, you arrive at the disgust- 
ing. You paint unclean objects. You linger over them ; 
you wallow in them. But this rottenness itself grows 
rotten. This decomposition engenders a fouler decompo- 
sition, until finally there remains an indescribable some- 
thing that no longer has a name in any language — and 
that is Baudelaire." 1 He concludes, that " Baudelaire is 
a sign not merely of decadence in literature, but of a 
general lowering in intelligence. What is grave, as a 

1 Etudes, iv, 284. 



SCHERER 211 

matter of fact, is not that a man has been found to 
write four volumes like his, but that such a man should 
have a reputation and admirers and even disciples ; that 
we should take him seriously; that I myself should be 
busied in writing an article about him." 1 

One is inclined to smile when, after such passages, 
Scherer says that he cannot understand those who would 
discuss literary preferences or who proceed by predilec- 
tions and aversions. 2 It is true that in this matter of 
critical standards he appeals at times from the philoso- 
phy of the flux, in part to common sense and in part to 
tradition. He is willing to admit " neither an aesthetic ab- 
solute nor the equal competency of all judges. Neither 
so high nor so low ; neither the ideals of Plato nor the 
anarchy of individual feelings. Now that the absolute 
has escaped us we are not to suppose that everything 
becomes arbitrary. Good judges have at all times ad- 
mired certain masterpieces and there are corruptions 
that no society or literature can tolerate under penalty 
of ceasing to be." 3 

If Scherer is not so flexible and comprehensive as 
Sainte-Beuve, if, as has been charged, he frequently 
shows bias and partiality, the fault lies less in the ex- 
cess of his philosophy and logic than in his moral se- 
verity, a severity that often has a somewhat Alceste 
flavor. In other words, in spite of his disavowals he is 
more or less subject to temperamental predilections and 
aversions. Both as a humanist and relativist he is on 
his guard against the extreme and the sectarian, against 

1 Etudes, iv, 289. 2 Ibid., x, 334 ; v, 66, etc. 8 Ibid., x, 329. 



212 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

holding any view too absolutely. He protests repeatedly 
against the logical exclusiveness and intolerance to 
which the French mind has always been prone and 
which seemed to him especially common in his own 
time. He complains of his " role of isolation in this age of 
universal fanaticism. The whole of literature is divided 
nowadays into sects, each one of which writes on its 
banner : Out of our ranks, no salvation. The romanti- 
cists are as exclusive as the realists, the Parnassians as 
narrow as the romanticists. I sometimes wonder what 
has become of the scholar and gentleman, in the seven- 
teenth-century sense, who, according to La Rochefou- 
cauld, does not pride himself on anything." 1 There may 
still be half a dozen persons left, he estimates, strangers 
to the horrible mania of certainty that you encounter 
everywhere in our time, who are not so fierce in their 
likes and dislikes, sensitive to force but still more to 
perfection, and not feeling themselves obliged to de- 
spise Racine because they admire Shakespeare, or 
Shakespeare because Racine charms them. " What scorn 
M. Zola would feel for one of these men if he chanced 
to meet him. And yet let him make no mistake, it is 
men of this kind who in the long run will be his 
judges." 2 

v 

Scherer's natural severity appears not merely in his 
attitude towards Zola or Baudelaire, but in his treatment 
of the most illustrious names. No critic is farther from 
a flabby appreciativeness. We read with curiosity his 

1 Etudes, vii, 171. 2 Ibid., 172. 



SCHERER 213 

essays on some of the great reputations to see what is 
going to survive of them after they have undergone 
the scrutiny of one so naturally austere and so free from 
merely conventional admirations. Arnold has made 
familiar to English readers two essays of this kind, 
those on Milton and Goethe. The essay on Goethe 
sprang, like the essay on Moliere, from the Protestant 
side of Scherer's nature, from his inability to acquiesce 
passively in any orthodoxy as such. He saw in the Ger- 
man cult of Goethe a proof of the assertion that man 
cannot get along without an authority into the hands 
of which he may abdicate his judgment. " The Ger- 
mans have long since exhausted the keenness of their 
criticism on God the Father and God the Son. They 
have left nothing standing of the infallibility of the 
church," * but they have got even, he goes on to say, 
by their blind worship of Goethe. " The biographers 
have traced all his steps, collected all his conversations, 
chronicled all his loves, written the lives of all the per- 
sons who had any relation with him, and they are deter- 
mined not to stop before they have established what the 
great man was doing at every moment of his existence. 
For the works of Goethe, of course, still more pains are 
taken to be complete. His slightest quatrains, his slight- 
est notes are hunted down ; his apothecary bills are 
printed; the parings of his nails and the hairs of his 
beard are collected." 2 The real merits of Goethe have 
been exaggerated by the superstitious admiration of a 
" nation that did not have any literature before him and 

1 Etudes, vin, 52. 2 Ibid., 53. 



214 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

has not had much since." 1 Such a sentence must have 
been peculiarly exasperating to the German reader and 
perhaps Scherer was not altogether sorry that it should 
be. We feel at times in the essay the smart of the 
Franco-Prussian War. Yet he ends by exalting Goethe 
as the representative modern man. He not only pro- 
claims his international importance, but gives the right 
reasons for it. 

The mixture of intellectual keenness and moral sever- 
ity in Scherer is equally apparent in what he says of the 
other great figure of the modern age, Napoleon. He 
admits that Napoleon had all the secondary virtues. " He 
was no less admirable as an organizer than as a soldier. 
He was economical, laborious, possessed of the most di- 
verse aptitudes. He had the knowledge of men and the 
art of making use of them. He has not been surpassed 
as a negotiator. He knew how to profit by a success ; 
how to intimidate, dissimulate, circumvent. No one, in 
a word, ever carried further the purely intellectual fac- 
ulties. But this marvellous intelligence only made more 
sensible in Napoleon the absence of true creative genius. 
When you try to render an account to yourself of what 
he wanted after all, of what he did, of what he left be- 
hind him, you find nothing ; he had no general guiding 
idea, he acted without purpose, he lived at random ; he 
moved feverishly in the void. He saved France, but 
only to allow it to fall lower than it was before. . . . 
He engaged in that barbarous and insensate thing, war 
for the sake of war. He undertook conquests after the 

1 Etudes, vi, 350. 



SCHERER 215 

fashion of the ancient despots of the Orient. He dreamed 
of the empire of Charlemagne, perhaps that of Alexan- 
der. That keen glance which penetrated the secrets of 
diplomacy, which foresaw with superhuman sagacity all 
the movements of a campaign, did not see what the 
meanest clerk in the foreign office might have told him 
— that he was headed for the abyss. Napoleon ventured 
to believe in the duration of his empire. He flattered 
himself that he should transmit it to his son ; or rather 
he believed nothing, thought nothing. He advanced at 
random, from victory to victory, from conquest to con- 
quest, after the fashion of the gambler who at every 
throw of the dice doubles his stake, being no longer 
able to dispense with the excitement of the camp, for- 
getting in his sublime and mad diversions that the life, 
the honor of nations, the safety of his country were 
involved. Napoleon is of all men the one who ex- 
hibits most clearly the two extremes of grandeur and 
littleness. He is genius in the service of madness." ' 
Note that Scherer' s repulsion for Napoleon was mainly 
a moral repulsion. " He is one of those southern na- 
tures," he says, " in whom the moral man is simply ab- 
sent. That is why he is at once so great and so small, 
so astonishing and so vulgar." 

" Does not criticism," asks Scherer, " consist above 
all in comprehending ? " 2 No, one might reply, but in 
judging. It should be evident by this time, however, 
that no one ever needed less than Scherer to be reminded 
of the critic's judicial function ; that he is remarkable, 

i Etudes, i, 141-142. * Etudes, 1, 322. 



216 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

on the contrary, for the intrepidity and severity of his 
judgments. Some might even see in his readiness "to 
deal damnation round the land," a survival of his theo- 
logical past. This disaccord between his instinct and 
theory is flagrant. For if, as he says, duty is phenome- 
nal 1 and morality relative, 2 like everything else, on what 
basis outside of those temperamental aversions and pre- 
dilections that he disavows will he justify his severity ? 
He is more preoccupied, again, with the whole ques- 
tion of decadence than befits a philosopher of the 
flux. Renan is, perhaps, a truer relativist when he says 
that "decadence is a word that must be definitively 
banished from the philosophy of history." 3 

The intimate contradiction in Scherer's being comes 
out in what he says of Darwin as it had come out in his 
earlier dealings with Hegel. " When you have once ac- 
quired," he says, " a scientific way of thinking, it no 
longer occurs to you to ask why the universe is what it 
is. The fact is accepted in its sovereignty. . . . There 
is no real but the real, and Darwin is its prophet. That 
is the declivity down which the human reason is slipping 
at this moment at the risk of leaving on the way many 
of the things that have constituted its strength and 
joy." 4 It is an eloquent testimony to the force of natu- 
ralism in the nineteenth century that a man who so 
craved fixed standards as Scherer, should yet have bowed 
his neck beneath its yoke in spite of the rebellion of his 
heart, and admitted that the only reality is change. 

1 Etudes, x, 125. 2 Etudes, vi, 209. 

8 Avenir de la science, 73. * Etudes, vi, 124. 



SCHERER 217 

Naturalism pushed to this point always involves some 
confusion of the planes of being, some subordination of 
what is higher in man to what is lower, and on the the- 
oretic side, some measure of that metaphysical illusion 
against which he was so on his guard. He is, however, 
far less sectarian in his naturalism than his fellow stoic, 
Taine. His literary criticism is not compromised by any 
excess of scientific zeal, and this should count in its 
favor in the long run. There is too much stoical bleak- 
ness about it, too much sheer disillusion, for it ever to 
win the popularity that it missed during Scherer's life. 
But the serious student will continue to consult it, not 
only because of the light it throws on certain spiritual 
crises of the nineteenth century, but for its rare combin- 
ation of accurate and cosmopolitan information with 
austere sincerity, vigorous handling of ideas, judicial 
courage, and " a passion for getting at the bottom of 
things." 



VIII 

TAINE 

Taine, who had a positive dislike for Scherer, was at 
one with him in the heartiness of his homage to Sainte- 
Beuve. We may judge, however, from Taine's article on 
Sainte-Beuve that the book he had planned on the same 
subject would, if he had lived to write it, have given a 
somewhat distorted image of the master. This article 
recalls Sainte-Beuve's theory of literary reputation which 
is itself only another application of his favorite theory of 
amour-propre. When a man survives in the memory of 
others, according to Sainte-Beuve, they do not see and 
admire him as he really was ; they merely see and ad- 
mire themselves in him. Viewed from Taine's special 
angle, Sainte-Beuve appears chiefly as a precursor of 
Taine. All Taine claims to have done is to have coordi- 
nated and systematized the scientific method that is every- 
where latent in the " Lundis." Seeing in him above all 
the naturalist, Taine pronounces him one of the five or 
six chief servants of the human spirit in the nineteenth 
century. Taine's eagerness to pass as the continuer of 
Sainte-Beuve is in curious contrast to Sainte-Beuve's 
own anxiety to mark the points wherein he and Taine 
diverge. 

i 

The differences between the two men are, as a matter 
of fact, much more striking than the similarities. Sainte- 



TAINE 219 

Beuve, as I have said, is above all a particularizer. He 
is open to the charge of being excessively prudent intel- 
lectually, of not coming out into the open often enough 
with the bold and direct affirmation. Taine, on the other 
hand, pushes his passion for generalization to the point 
of temerity. He not only loves to think, as he tells us, 
but to "think quickly." It is to be feared that he thought 
far too quickly on many subjects, and then clung too 
tenaciously to his first conclusions. Perhaps he might 
have been less tenacious if he had been more discursive 
and less logical in his thinking. But he possessed in the 
highest degree that gift for abstract reasoning which is 
so closely related to the mathematical gift that Pascal 
termed it V esprit de geometric Indeed Pascal's famous 
distinction between V esprit de geometrie and V esprit de 
finesse constantly occurs to one in comparing Sainte- 
Beuve and Taine. No critic ever surpassed Sainte-Beuve 
in the esprit de finesse, the art of rendering life in its 
infinite complexity, without preconceived system, sans 
tant de methode, as he phrases it. It is with books as 
with grapes ; you lose the finest flavors that may be ex- 
tracted from them if you subject them to too severe a 
pressure. 1 Taine, on the contrary, is for squeezing out the 
very last drop of what seems to him general truth from 
anything that has once gone into his critical winepress. 
Before becoming a recluse Sainte-Beuve had had a 
many-sided contact with the world. "As for me," he 
writes in one of his earlier letters, "I go into society 
and I observe." 2 Taine began too much as Sainte-Beuve 

1 Chateaubriand, I, 234. 2 Correspondance inedite, 224. 



220 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ended. Sainte-Beuve himself was struck by a loss of 
balance in the youth of the generation to which Taine 
belonged. Many of the youths >of this generation might 
have said of themselves with Renan, that they suffered 
from a sort of encephalitis. We may indeed define the 
malady that afflicted these representative young men of 
the middle of the century, as a frenzied intellect ualism. 
The congestion of all the powers of the personality in 
the brain is apparent in Taine in a very literal sense. 
When only a boy he had leeches applied to his head at 
the time of the general examinations. His intellectual 
high-pressure was so continuous in later life that he was 
subject to periods of complete prostration, in one case 
lasting for two years. 

To see life so purely from the angle of the intellect is 
to have an extreme and one-sided view. But Taine did 
not shrink back instinctively from the extreme and one- 
sided. Psychologically no more important question can 
be asked about a man than whether he is a mediator or 
an extremist. The contrast between Taine and Sainte- 
Beuve is in this particular especially striking. We have 
already seen this contrast in Taine' s cult of the master 
faculty without any humanistic counterpoise. He revels 
in a rampant naturalism. The violence and excess of 
Balzac, which so repels Sainte-Beuve, exercises upon 
Taine a positive fascination. The Essay on Balzac was 
perhaps more influential as a naturalistic manifesto than 
the " Preface de Cromwell " had been as a manifesto of 
romanticism. Balzac, according to Taine, is a type of 
the enormously expansive personality, so exuberant and 



TAINE 221 

forceful that he is incapable of self-control. The same 
exuberant force is found in his creations. You would 
not care to encounter such characters in real life, but in 
literature they are admirable. If you were walking in 
the country you would rather meet a lamb than a lion, 
but if the lion is behind bars he is more interesting than 
the lamb. Art is the equivalent of the bars. Artists 
should therefore exhibit to us wild beasts as a relief from 
the platitude of everyday prose. This Balzac does to 
perfection. We are not interested in his men and women 
as such. " They are merely the pedestals of a statue 
which is their master passion." 1 This passion has eaten 
up their humanity. Hulot is not a man but a tempera- 
ment. The master impulse develops in Philippe Bridau 
until there is "no longer anything human left in his 
nature " — nothing but " the inhuman and sinister glitter 
of a bronze statue." 2 Grandet is impressive because 
his passion has come to such a pass that " it has cut off 
in him the very root of humanity and pity." 3 Like Shake- 
speare, Balzac paints monomaniacs of every species. 
Taine notes with satisfaction that one of his short stories 
contains no fewer than seven monomaniacs. 

A writer in the London " Spectator " remarked re- 
cently that Bernard Shaw lacks the sense of the human. 
It is evident from the passages I have quoted that Taine 
suffered from a similar lack. In his " English Literature " 
he sets Madame Marneffe (the very character that in- 
spired a special aversion in Sainte-Beuve) above Becky 
Sharp, apparently because Becky Sharp still remains a 

1 Essais de critique, etc., 147. a Ibid., 138. 8 Ibid., 144. 



222 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

human being, albeit a very perverse one. Madame Mar- 
neffe, on the other hand, is the inevitable outcome of 
her environment and temperament and so is not amen- 
able to ordinary human or moral standards. " She is 
perfect in her kind, like a dangerous and splendid horse 
that you admire and fear at the same time. ,, 1 

Taine's lack of sense of the human has played him 
some evil turns, especially, it would seem, in his treat- 
ment of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was an age 
of great naturalistic expansion, but also in important re- 
spects a humanistic age. All Taine sees in the period is 
the " complete and violent expansion of nature." 2 As 
for the art and literature of the time it is an unusually 
well-stocked menagerie; there is a refreshing absence 
of tame domestic animals, and wild beasts a-plenty. " We 
can hear through the plays, as through the history of 
the time, their savage growling ; the sixteenth century is 
like a den of lions." The dehumanizing of Shakespeare 
that he had begun in the Essay on Balzac he completes 
in the " English Literature." He cannot find epithets 
enough to describe the immeasurable unrestraint of hu- 
man nature as it appears in Shakespeare and the other 
dramatists of his time. We see in all these dramatists 
"genuine and primitive man beside himself, aflame, the 
slave of his animal impulses, and the plaything of his 
dreams, entirely given up to the present moment, com- 
pacted of lusts, contradictions and follies; who, with 
outbursts and quivers, with cries of voluptuousness and 
anguish, rolls consciously and deliberately down the 

1 Lit. ang. t v, 122. 2 Ibid., n, 1. 



TAINE 223 

steep slopes and jagged points of his precipice." l If 
Shakespeare had written a psychology he would have 
said that man is a " nervous machine governed by tem- 
perament, disposed to hallucinations, carried away by 
unbridled passions, essentially unreasonable, a mixture 
of animal and poet, having feeling as his virtue, imagin- 
ation as mainspring and guide, and conducted at random 
by the most highly determined and complex circum- 
stances to pain, crime, madness and death." 2 

In Taine's somewhat decadent cult for energy, even 
when displayed in madness and crime, we can trace in 
him as in various other respects the influence of Stendhal. 
In fact we might establish the wideness of the gap be- 
tween Taine and Sainte-Beuve, not merely by comparing 
them directly, but by studying the respective influen- 
ces upon them. Most of the men who exercised a major 
influence upon Taine either did not act upon Sainte- 
Beuve at all, or were positively antipathetic to him. The 
authors that Taine affected during his formative years 
were those who made either intellectually or emotionally 
for a pure naturalism. His special partiality for Balzac 
and Stendhal is perhaps to be explained by the fact that 
they combined both the intellectual and emotional as- 
pects of the movement. They had the cult of pure spon- 
taneity in the Rousseauistic sense, along with the scien- 
tific and deterministic explanation of it. One should also 
note Taine's predilection for Alfred de Musset (especi- 
ally in the poems of passion) and Michelet, possibly the 
two romantic writers who let themselves go most furi- 
1 Lit. ang.y n, 48. 2 Ibid., n, 259. 



224 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ously. The closing pages of the "English Literature," in 
which Taine exalts Alfred de Musset above Tennyson 
on the ground of his superior spontaneity, are almost too 
familiar to mention. 

On the scientific side Taine's naturalism is indebted 
to England and Germany as well as France. He is under 
important obligations to Stuart Mill (who himself re- 
flects in some measure the influence of Comte) and in 
general to the minutely experimental and utilitarian 
school of Englishmen, the school that would confine 
itself to facts, and their interrelationships. "Little 
facts," Taine declares in a celebrated sentence, " care- 
fully chosen, important, significant, abundantly circum- 
stanced and minutely noted, such is to-day the sub- 
stance of all knowledge." 1 But after all he craved a 
more ample theory. He wished to pass, as he could not 
in this English thinking, " from the accidental to the 
necessary, from the relative to the absolute, from appear- 
ance to truth." 2 And for this intellectual absolute he 
turned to Germany. The reading of Hegel's " Logic " 
was one of the great events of his youth. He describes 
it as " the monster I spent six months digesting at 
Nevers." 3 As to the way these English and German ele- 
ments combined in his thinking, we may let Taine speak 
for himself. After saying that " experiment and ab- 
straction constitute between them all the resources of 
the human spirit," he adds : " One directs practice ; the 
other, speculation. The first leads one to look on nature 
as a body of facts, the second as a system of laws ; em- 

1 Intelligence, I, 4. a Lit. ang., v, 410. 8 Vie et cor., n, 30. 



TAINE 225 

ployed by itself, the first is English ; employed by itself, 
the second is German." He goes on to say that France 
may profitably undertake the task of mediating between 
the two schools. " We broadened out English ideas in 
the eighteenth century ; we may in the nineteenth-cen- 
tury give precision to the ideas of Germany. Our busi- 
ness is to temper, correct and complete the two spirits 
by each other, to fuse them into one, to express them 
in a style that everybody understands and thus give 
them universal currency." 1 

Taine got from Hegel and the Germans the idea of 
development, especially the development according to 
fixed laws, of great bodies of men — in other words, a 
philosophy of history. Sainte-Beuve had small liking 
for this attempt as it appears, for example, in a writer 
like Guizot, to impose an intellectual order upon the 
facts of the past. We can never, he says, slash too deeply 
into any possible philosophy of history. He is dis- 
trustful of systematic general views, of " those trumpet 
blasts," as he calls them, " which coordinate the facts, line 
them up instantly, and make them march in good order 
as though under a banner." 2 Now Taine is attracted 
by the very side of Guizot that seemed so doubtful to 
Sainte-Beuve. His philosophy of history is not the same 
as Guizot's, but he believes in a philosophy of history, 
and is indeed less interested in art and literature for 
their own sakes, than as aids towards such a philosophy. 
Moreover, in his way of reaching his results he shows 
himself more akin to Guizot than to the Germans. We 

1 Lit. ang. f v, 416. * N. Lundis, vi, 79. 



226 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

should be justified by Taine's own method in seeking to 
explain as a racial proclivity the special type of logi- 
cality that we find in his mind as well as in Guizot's. 

ii 

We might indeed accept Taine's method more readily 
if it applied to every one as well as it does to himself. 
He may be studied more than most men as a product of 
race, environment and, above all, historical moment; 
and we can see in him, more clearly than in most men, 
how these various factors combined to determine the 
nature and exercise of his master faculty. M. Saisset, 
one of Taine's teachers at the Normal School, writes a 
very eulogistic note on his pupil, but adds : " His prin- 
cipal fault is an excessive taste for abstraction." A year 
earlier M. Vacherot, another of his teachers, wrote in 
the course of a similar note : " He is over-fond of for- 
mulae to which he too frequently sacrifices reality, with- 
out suspecting the fact, to be sure, for he is perfectly sin- 
cere." * Taine's dominant trait, here so happily charac- 
terized, is also the dominant trait of the French as com- 
pared with other peoples. This passion for pure logi- 
cality manifests itself in the scholastic philosophy, mani- 
fests itself in Descartes, who attacked scholasticism, 
manifests itself in Taine, who assailed the excess of 
raison raisonnante in the political Cartesians of the 
eighteenth century. Taine sees a survival of the old 
Scandinavian sea-rover in young Englishmen who hunt 
bear in the Rocky Mountains or elephants in South 

1 Vie et cor., i f 123. 



TAINE 227 

Africa. We have at least as good ground for seeing 
the survival of a primordial racial impulse in his own 
love of formulae. 

The two other main elements in Taine's work, which 
may be defined as the love of little facts and the love 
of local color, are subordinated to his love of formulae. 
He has pages of word-painting, worthy of Gautier, but 
we suddenly discover that the word-painting is not for 
its own sake, as it would be with Gautier, but is in the 
service of a demonstration. He accumulates little facts 
again in enormous numbers, but the formula presides 
over their selection. We should add with M. Vacherot 
that this choice is unconscious, for Taine, after all, had 
a mind of admirable probity. But with this proviso we 
may say of Taine, as Aristotle said of the Pythagoreans, 
that where there was " any slight misfit between the 
logic and the facts some gentle pressure would be ap- 
plied " to bring the facts into accord with the system ; or 
we may apply to Taine what Dr. Johnson asserted with 
less justice of Hurd : that he "is one of a set of men 
who account for everything systematically ; for instance, 
it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches ; these 
men would tell you that, according to causes and effects, 
no other wear could at that time have been chosen." 
In much this way, Taine undertakes to prove that in an 
ascetic period such as certain moments of the Middle 
Ages, it was, according to causes and effects, impossible 
for any individual to have and, above all, to express a 
cheerful view of life. 

Taine's constant pursuit, then, of the master trait, 



228 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

whether of a race or an epoch or an individual, is in 
reality the pursuit of the master formula. " The diffi- 
culty for me in an investigation," he writes, " is to find 
some characteristic and dominant trait from which 
everything may be deduced geometrically, in a word to 
have the formula of the thing. It seems to me that the 
formula of Livy is as follows : an orator who becomes an 
historian." And so Taine proceeds to write a book on 
Livy, in which the Roman historian and his works in all 
their complexity are forced into this logical mould. For 
the ruling passion with Taine is not, as it is with Sainte- 
Beuve, one passion among other and more or less inde- 
pendent passions, but " like Aaron's serpent, swallows 
up the rest," or rather it commands them by a sort of 
mathematical and mechanical necessity. Taine puts this 
interdependence of faculties under the patronage of 
science, under the name of the law of mutual depend- 
encies. 1 " Just as in an animal the instincts, teeth, limbs, 
bony framework, muscular apparatus are bound together 
in such wise that a variation in one of them determines 
in each of the others a corresponding variation, and 
just as a skilled naturalist can, from a few fragments, 
reconstruct by reasoning almost the whole body," 2 even 
so an historian who knew one part of a civilization might 
half predict the other parts. You can thus find the com- 
mon formula of phenomena apparently as distinct as a 
flower-bed at Versailles, a philosophic and theologic rea- 
soning of Malebranche, a precept of versification by 

1 See especially preface to Essais de critique et d'histoire. 

2 Lit. ang.y Int., i, p. xi. 



TAINE 229 

Boileau, a law of Colbert on mortgages, a courtier's 
compliment at Marly, a sentence of Bossuet on the di- 
vine omnipotence. They are simply different ways in 
which the " ideal and general man " of that age ex- 
pressed his dominant faculty. 1 

Taine's emphasis on the master faculty is due not 
merely to his love of the master formula, but as I have 
already pointed out, in speaking of his relation to Bal- 
zac, to his love of an unchecked spontaneity. In study- 
ing the forms that his love of Rousseauistic spontaneity 
assumes we can once more apply his own method to him- 
self, and trace in him the effect of environment, especi- 
ally of early environment. " I was born," he says, " in 
the forest of Arden and I love it ; and yet I have of it 
only childish memories. But the river, the meadow, the 
woods, one has seen in his first walks, leave in the depths 
of the soul an impression that the rest of life completes 
and does not disturb. Everything that you imagine later 
takes its rise there; it even seems that everything is there, 
and that the full day can never equal the dawn." 2 
Throughout his life Taine's imagination was haunted by 
the woods, and at Paris he often suffered a veritable nos- 
talgia for them, and in general for the forms of outer 
nature. He has been called a poet-logician. But perhaps 
more is needed to make a poet than a gift for rendering 
vividly the forms of outer nature. His style does, how- 
ever, combine to a singular extent logic with local color. 
It is at once and to an almost paradoxical degree ana- 

1 Essais de critique et d'Tiistoire, pp. xiv-xv. 

2 Derniers Essais, etc., 43. 



230 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

lytical and pictorial, abstract and impressionistic. In a 
curious self-examination that was found among his 
papers, he raises the question whether the secret war- 
fare between these two elements in his style was not re- 
sponsible for the fatigue he felt in composing. 1 Perhaps 
it is due to the final predominance of analysis in his mind 
that he falls short in his descriptive passages of the 
highest effects of the word-painter : he does not give us 
so much complete vision as intense segments of vision. 

To the predominance of analysis is also due the fact 
that the total effect of Taine's style is not, in spite of 
the profuse imagery, one of imaginative freedom. One 
suspects that if, in Johnson's phrase, he was for making 
mind mechanical, it was because his own mind was some- 
what mechanical. His style lacks inner give and elasti- 
city. It reflects a materialistic age in that it conveys the 
impression of sheer power rather than of grace and 
measure. Scherer says that he can never read Taine 
without thinking of " those gigantic steam trip-hammers 
that strike repeated and noisy blows. Under this con- 
stant impact the steel is bent and fashioned. Everything 
gives you the feeling of force. But you must add that 
you are stunned by so much noise and that, after all, this 
style, which has the solidity and glitter of metal, has 
also at times something of its heaviness and hardness." 2 

One of Taine's unfulfilled projects was to write, as a 

companion volume to his treatise on the "Intelligence," 

a treatise on the " Will " ; but we may be sure he would 

have identified the will with energy. " Our mind is con- 

1 Vie et cor., n, 261. a Etudes, vi, 135. 



TAINE 231 

structed as mathematically as a watch," he says in the 
essay on Michelet. " The movement which the main- 
spring (that is, the master faculty) communicates to the 
parts of the mechanism escapes the control of our will be- 
cause it is our will itself" In other words, he has no 
belief in that other form of spontaneity, that inner check 
that may restrain the elan vital and direct it to some 
human end. He worships vital impulse as much as M. 
Bergson, only he would subordinate it strictly (and herein 
of course he differs from M. Bergson) to mechanical 
law. He has endless comparisons to suggest how inevit- 
ably human faculties unfold and how little they are a 
matter of individual choice and volition. At on* +ime he 
compares man to the lower animals ; his only ain 
torian, he says, is to be a student of moral I 

" You may," he says again, " consider man as ~~ 

mal of superior species who produces philosophies and 
poems about as silkworms produce their cocoons and 
bees their cells." 2 He is going to study the transforma- 
tion of France by the French Eevolution as he would 
the " metamorphosis of an insect." 3 

But normally he inclines to a form of spontaneity 
even more inevitable and instinctive than that of the 
insect — that, namely, of the plant. Sainte-Beuve had 
described himself in one of his naturalistic moods, as a 
botanist of the human spirit. 4 Taine takes up this meta- 
phor and applies it with a persistency and literalness 
that would never have occurred to Sainte-Beuve. Both 

1 Origines, La Revolution, in, Preface. a La Fontaine, Preface. 

* Origines, Ancien regime, Preface. 4 See p. 145. 



232 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

as a scientific and as a sentimental naturalist (whose 
memory was haunted by the forest of Arden) he found 
his account in his unending comparisons of human be- 
ings to trees and plants. The word for which he has the 
greatest predilection is probably sap (seve). What most 
delights him is the vigorous rising of the sap in the 
human vegetation. Like Stendhal he admires Italy be- 
cause it is there that the human plant grows most luxu- 
riantly. We are going to see in his pages the whole 
genius of Shakespeare " unfold before us like a flower." 
He does not feel that he is lowering Shakespeare by thus 
comparing him to a plant. We could not ask anything 
better than to be like trees. " These great trees make 
you great ; they are happy and calm heroes ; you become 
so by contagion on seeing them. You feel like crying 
out to them : You are beautiful and powerful oak's, you 
are strong, you enjoy your force and your luxuriant 
foliage." 1 

This aspiration towards a sort of vegetative felicity is 
thoroughly Rousseauistic. It must indeed be clear by this 
time how closely one whole side of Taine is related to 
romanticism. To understand this relationship we shall 
have to study the influence of the moment and thus com- 
plete our application of his own method to himself. We 
need to interpret his work with reference to the open 
and avowed materialism of the Second Empire, just as 
we need to interpret Sainte-Beuve's earlier work with re- 
ference to the pseudo-idealism of 1830. I have already 
pointed out that this pseudo-idealism met utter discom- 
1 Thomas Graindorge, 253. 



TAINE 233 

fiture in 1848. It had become clear that the real world 
at all events would have none of it. And so Taine gave 
over the real world to the dominion of the literal fact, 
and set out to rear on this foundation the new cult of 
science. At the same time, however, that he is a scien- 
tific positivist, he is a disillusioned romanticist, and his 
whole work is pervaded by the bitter flavor of this dis- 
illusion, — by the sense of the ironical contradiction be- 
tween the desires of the heart and the actual. Nature, 
for Taine and the men of his time, was no longer the 
kind mother that she had been for Wordsworth and 
Lamartine (la nature est la qui f invite et qui t'aime), 
but a collection of inexorable laws. The most definite 
personification of nature in Taine is the following, taken, 
to be sure, from his most cynical book, the " Life and 
Opinions of Thomas Graindorge " : " Towards the end 
of his life Louis XI had a collection of young pigs that 
he had dressed up as nobles, bourgeois and canons. 
They had been cudgelled into obedience, and danced in 
this equipage before him. The unknown lady, called 
Nature, does the same ; probably she is a humorist ; only, 
when by dint of hard lashings she has got us to fill our 
roles and has laughed abundantly at our grimaces, she 
sends us to the pork-butcher and the salting-tub." 1 

The romanticists not only believed in the goodness of 
nature, but in the natural goodness of man even though 
he is commonly perverted by society. " Man," says Taine, 
on the contrary, " has canine teeth like the dog and fox, 
and like the dog and fox he buried them at the begin- 

1 Thomas Graindorge, pp. ix-x. 



234 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ning in the flesh of his fellows. His descendants slaugh- 
tered one another with stone knives for a bit of raw 
fish." The equivalent still goes on under the surface of 
our modern conventions. 1 Life was never so hideous, he 
says of one period of the Renaissance, and this hideous- 
ness is the truth. Thus Taine's head finds its truth and 
reality in an order that is abhorrent to his heart. The 
instinct of the heart is to escape from such a reality into 
a pays des chimeres. This is what he calls creating for 
yourself an alibi : One such alibi, as we have already 
seen, is to lose yourself in aesthetic contemplation of the 
i forms of outer nature. Another way of creating an alibi 
is to study history. " Through this gate you enter into 
revery. All opium is unhealthy ; it is prudent to take it 
only in small doses and from time to time. Since Wer- 
ther and Rene we have taken too much of it, and are 
taking it in heavier doses every day ; consequently the 
malady of the age has been aggravated, and in music, 
painting and politics a number of symptoms prove that 
the derangement of reason, imagination, sensibility and 
nerves is on the increase. Among all the drugs that give 
us at our will factitious absence and forgetfulness, his- 
tory is, I believe, the least dangerous." 2 A third way 
of creating an alibi is by music. Jouez du Beethoven. 
The whole point of view may be defined as positivism 
mitigated by romantic revery. 

1 Thomas Graindorge, 267. 2 DernUrs essais, etc., 226. 



TAINE 235 

in 

Taine recognized that he and his contemporaries could 
never hope for more than a half recovery from the mal- 
ady of the age, which was a part of their legacy from 
the preceding generation. " We shall attain to truth," 
he says, "but not to calm. All that we can cure at this 
moment is our intelligence ; we have no hold on our 
feelings." 1 But he hoped that in their descendants this 
warfare between head and heart might cease, and that 
they would give themselves up without qualms or re- 
grets to scientific positivism. It was in fact as a scien- 
tific positivist that Taine was enormously influential on 
the men of his own and the following generation. Be- 
fore carrying further, therefore, our study of his atti- 
tude towards nature and human nature, we shall need to 
consider more carefully certain aspects of this positiv- 
ism. Taine himself has taken pains in one of his essays 
to define it and show in what respects it is hostile to the 
old idealism : " Its first rule in the search for truth is to 
reject all extraneous authority, to yield only to direct 
evidence, to wish to touch and to see, to have faith in 
testimony only after examination, discussion and veri- 
fication ; its greatest aversion is for affirmations without 
proof, which it calls prejudices, and for unquestioning 
belief which it calls credulity"; it opposes reason to 
faith, nature to revelation, experiment and induction to 
a priori formulae. The struggle between these rival 
views of life, which has been in progress since the Re- 

1 Lit. ang.y nr, 423. 



236 MODEKN FRENCH CRITICISM 

naissance, is what has been called the warfare of science 
and religion. 

To Descartes rather than to Bacon belongs the honor 
of having brought the natural sciences into entire ac- 
cord with the modern spirit. He reduced the phenome- 
nal world to a mere problem of space and movement; 
he substituted quantities and mathematical measure- 
ments for the discussion of qualities ; he banished from 
science the speculations about entities, essences, occult 
properties and final causes which had encumbered the 
philosophy of the schools. Descartes, however, still re- 
mained in great measure mediaeval in his psychology, 
conceiving as he did of the soul as living quite apart 
from the body, having its seat in the pineal gland, in 
much the same way, to quote a recent writer, " as the 
hermit crab resides in its borrowed shell." The constant 
tendency since Descartes has been to deny man this su- 
periority of essence over the rest of creation, and to 
assimilate him more and more, body and soul, to the 
lower animals. Moliere, in " Les Femmes Savantes," is 
one of the first to protest against the mechanical sep- 
aration of the soul from the body, for which the pre- 
cieuses sought a sanction in Descartes : — 
" Oui, mon corps est moi-mgme," 

and 

" Mon ame et mon corps marchent de compagnie," etc. 

The last step is taken by Taine when he affirms that 
the soul is a natural product, and should therefore be 
treated by the same methods as other natural phenom- 
ena. In psychology as in the other sciences we must 



TAINE 237 

refrain from all consideration of qualities and absolute 
values, and confine ourselves to observation and exact 
measurements. " Science draws near at last and draws 
near to man ; it has passed the visible and palpable 
world of stars, plants and stones to which men had dis- 
dainfully confined it ; it is laying hold upon the soul, 
having at its disposal all the keen and exact instru- 
ments of which three hundred years of experiment have 
proved the precision and measured the scope." 1 

This one thought — the application of scientific 
method to the soul — runs through all the writings of 
Taine, and gives them their extraordinary unity. He 
has ranged through ancient and modern history, litera- 
ture and art, in search of illustrations for this his main 
thesis. A book or picture interests him chiefly as a 
" sign " or " document " giving evidence of some phase 
of the human spirit in the past. This general character 
visible in a work of art is due, not to the free choice of 
the artist, but to the fact that he acted under the im- 
pulse of a " master faculty " ; and the nature of this 
" master faculty " is determined in turn by the artist's 
" race " and heredity, the climate and " environment " 
which have made his race what it is, and by the " mo- 
ment " in the historical development of his race at which 
his life has happened to fall. Under this accumulation 
of outer influences the free agency of the individual 
tends entirely to disappear. For it would not be possi- 
ble to prove that " vice and virtue are products like 
sugar and vitriol," 2 if a single act of the individual will 

1 Lit. ang. f rv, 423. 3 Lit. ang. t I, p. xv. 



238 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

intervene/f to break the chain of natural causes and 
thus baffle all the previsions of the analyst.. This deter- 
minism or scientific fatalism, though nowhere expressly 
formulated by Taine, is a necessary corollary of his 
doctrine. 

Taine is also led logically by his method to deny the 
existence of the soul in the sense of a permanent ego 
behind the flux of phenomena. Thus understood, the 
soul is only the last and most troublesome of the medi- 
aeval "entities" of which the positivist is trying to 
purge science. The ego in the eyes of Taine is only a 
resultant — the point of convergence of certain natural 
forces, with no reality apart from these forces, or from 
what he calls the " succession of its events." ' " Beings, 
whether physical or moral," seen from this point of 
view, resemble " an infinite number of rockets . . . 
forever and unceasingly rising and falling in the black- 
ness of the void." 2 Man, thus bereft of all principle of 
superiority over nature, is tossed helplessly in the vast 
ebb and flow of natural forces : — 

"Owe poor orphans of nothing — alone on that lonely shore 
Born of the brainless nature who knew not that which she bore ! " 

In a celebrated image, 3 Taine compares the position 
of the human family in the midst of the blind and in- 
different powers of nature to that of a lot of field-mice 
exposed to the tramplings of a herd of elephants ; and 
he concludes that " the best fruit of our science is cold 
resignation which, pacifying and preparing the spirit, 

1 La file de ses eVenements. — Preface de C Intelligence, 9. 
3 Ibid., 11. 8 Vie et opinions de Thomas Graindorge, 265. 



TAINE 239 

reduces suffering to bodily pain." 1 Bourget 2 has traced 
the relation between this philosophy of Taine and the 
pessimism and discouragement so rife in France during 
the last generation. All the nobler aspirations of man, 
all his notions of conduct, had clustered around the old- 
time conception of the soul, and of the struggle between 
a higher and lower self. The weakening of the tradi- 
tional belief has been followed by such an unsettling 
of all fixed standards, by such intellectual and moral 
chaos, that we are inclined to ask whether the modern 
man has not lost in force of will and character more 
than an equivalent of what he has gained in scientific 
knowledge of life. Do we not miss in Goethe himself, 
that high-priest of the modern spirit, a certain elevation 
and purity, such as we find, for example, in Pascal, one 
of the last great representatives of the mediaeval idealism ? 
The triumph of naturalism has been followed by a serious 
falling-off, for the moment at least, in the more purely 
spiritual activities of man. Taine refused to recognize 
himself in M. Sixte, the philosopher in Bourget' s " Dis- 
ciple," whose deterministic doctrines impelled Robert 
Greslou to crime. 3 He resented still more strongly the 
claims of writers like Zola to be his disciples. Yet there 
is a real relation between the doctrines of Taine and 
those of Zola and the other promoters of what has been 
termed la litterature brutale — the literature which ex- 
alts the power of the animal passions, proclaims the 
tyranny of temperament, and seeks the determining f ac- 

1 Vie et opinions de Thomas Graindorge, 266. 

2 Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 233 ff . 8 < Vie et cor., IV, 287 ff . 



240 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

tors of conduct in the blood and nerves. Taine himself in 
his " English Literature " has multiplied epithets describ- 
ing the irresistible pressure of natural causes upon man. 
" What we call nature is this brood of secret impulses, 
often maleficent, generally vulgar, always blind, which 
tremble and fret within us, ill-covered by the cloak of 
decency and reason under which we try to disguise them; 
we think we lead them and they lead us ; we think our 
actions our own, they are theirs." 1 This fatality of in- 
stinct makes even the romantic fatality of passion look 
respectable. 

If Taine took so brutal a view of life it was not be- 
cause he himself was brutal, but because he was, on 
the contrary, one of the gentlest of men. Life is likely 
to seem especially ferocious to the man who stands aside 
from action and becomes extremely sensitive and intel- 
lectual without at the same time developing in himself, 
as Pascal did, for example, the sense of a principle of 
superiority in man to the monstrous, blind forces of 
nature. Taine would not indeed admit that he was a 
pessimist, or an optimist, either, for that matter. He 
looked upon both attitudes towards life as unscientific. 
He disclaimed on the same ground any moral responsi- 
bility for the practical consequences of his thinking. 
He asserted, especially at the beginning of his career, 
the doctrine of science for the sake of science. 2 He was 
also ready to affirm the doctrine of art for art's sake. 
The older he grew the more anxious he became to jus- 
tify art and science, if not morally, at least socially. A 
1 Lit. ang., iv, 130. * Phttosophes classiques, 36-37. 



TAINE 241 

pure naturalist may, according to Pascal's great general- 
ization, be either a stoic or an epicurean. Taine is one 
of the best examples in recent times of pure stoicism. In 
enumerating the main influences upon him I failed to 
mention that his favorite author was Marcus Aurelius. 
" Our positive science," he says, " has penetrated more 
deeply into the details of the laws that rule the world, 
but save for differences of language it culminates in 
this total view " 1 (that is, the view of Marcus Aurelius). 
And he writes in a letter towards the end of his life, 
"Marcus Aurelius is the gospel of those of us who have 
passed through philosophy and the sciences; he says 
to people of our cultivation what Jesus says to the com- 
mon people." 2 This, I take it, is a good example of the 
stoic pride. In some respects it is farther from true 
wisdom than the epicurean relaxation. 

Taine was at all events a worthy disciple. It is diffi- 
cult to make a long study of him and not esteem him 
personally, however one may withhold this esteem from 
his philosophy. Marcus Aurelius was as much filled as 
one of our modern humanitarians with the zeal for ser- 
vice, and in this respect Taine came more and more to 
resemble his master. He had begun by saying that the 
scientific critic neither blames nor praises, but merely 
takes cognizance of and explains ; and we have already 
seen to what kind of human fauna he accorded his 
aesthetic approval. " Criticism," he says, " does like bo- 
tany, which studies with equal interest at one moment 
the orange tree, at another the pine ; at one moment the 

1 Nouveaux essais, etc., 316. 2 Vie et cor., iv, 274. 



242 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

laurel, and at another the birch ; it is itself a sort of bo- 
tany applied not to plants but to the works of man." 
But in his "Philosophy of Art" (1865-69) he strives 
to value and classify as well as take cognizance and 
explain. It is not necessary to dwell at length on his 
efforts in these volumes to arrive at a standard of judg- 
ment ; first, because these efforts have been comparatively 
uninfluential ; secondly, because he does not succeed 
after all in transcending naturalism — in other words, 
the phenomenal and the relative. Perhaps the chief point 
he makes is that we may judge of a work of art by its 
degree of beneficence, that is by its social utility. We 
may say that some books and works of art are noxious 
weeds, whereas others are to be esteemed by their fruits. 
This is a standard that on the whole works against his 
early romantic admirations ; and so we may note a grow- 
ing severity for the romanticists, especially in his essays 
on George Sand and Edouard Bertin. If he had lived to 
write the last volume of the u Origines " we may infer 
from the memoranda he left behind him that his treat- 
ment of the school of 1830 (including Alfred de Musset) 
would have been scathing. 1 Taine puts this development 
in his point of view under the patronage of Goethe, " the 
great promoter," as he calls him, " of all our contempo- 
rary culture." But Goethe was not simply a great natur- 
alist ; he was also a humanist. He felt intuitively that 
side of man which is on a different level from the animal 
or plant. So far as his intuitions are concerned, Taine 
seems to me never to have risen above the botanical or 
zoological levels. 

1 Vie et cor., in, 309 f. < 



TAINE 243 

IV 

I have just spoken of the " Origines." The shock of 
the war of 1870 and the Commune, which so under- 
mined the seriousness of Renan, had just the opposite 
effect on Taine. He became more austerely serious than 
ever, and in undertaking his great historical work he 
was moved by a passionate desire to serve his country 
and warn it against the abyss towards which it seemed 
to him to be hastening. The indignation that quivers in 
his style contrasts strangely with his promise to study 
the Revolution with the coolness of a naturalist observ- 
ing "the metamorphosis of an insect," and in general 
with the attitude of the determinist who looks on vice 
and virtue as products like vitriol and sugar. His pas- 
sion animates his logic and his logic imposes upon him 
in turn the choice and arrangement he makes of his im- 
mense accumulation of little facts. He manages so to 
select these little facts as to add gloom even to the Reign 
of Terror. Views of the Revolution may be held, very 
different from those of Taine, but it is hardly likely that 
what one may term the legend of the Revolution will 
ever recover from the sombre and concentrated energy 
of his attack. It will not be easy for the Hugos and 
Michelets of the future to grow rhapsodic over the 
" giants of '93." One may say that the whole work con- 
verges on his psychological analysis of the Jacobin. 
Taine's violent logic is never so effective as when thus 
used to attack men who are themselves violently logical. 

The weakest part of his argument is the attempt to 



244 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

show that the excess of abstract reasoning for which 
he assails the Jacobins is a direct outcome of the classic 
spirit. He has been misled in an extraordinary way in 
assuming that the pseudo-classic veneer one finds in 
a Robespierre, for example, has any relation to the 
reality of classicism. Boileau, says Taine, was the an- 
cestor of Robespierre. 1 Now the authentic ancestor of 
Boileau was Horace, so that Horace is thus held in- 
directly responsible for the Reign of Terror ! Taine has 
lost sight of the simple distinction implied in John 
Adams's saying that man is a reasoning, but not a 
reasonable, animal. This saying is manifestly true of 
the Jacobins, but if applied to a true classicist would 
have to be exactly reversed. Reason, though somewhat 
more abstract in Boileau than in Horace, still means the 
intuitive good sense that is opposed to everything fan- 
tastic and extreme (including the extreme of logic). 
Boileau himself was remarkably intuitive in this sense, 
but somewhat weak, especially for a Frenchman, in 
logic. Taine' s identification of Jacobinism with the 
classic spirit is therefore, as M. Faguet says, about the 
most complete blunder ever made both in the interpre- 
tation of texts as well as in literary history. 

The presence in man of an intuitive good sense pecu- 
liarly his own, and warning him against violence and 
excess, Taine simply denied. To say that he was con- 
scious of no such balance wheel in man is only to repeat 
in another form my assertion that he lacked the sense 
of the human. " Properly speaking," he had written in 
1 Vie et cor., in, 268. 



TAINE 245 

his " English Literature," " man is mad as the body is 
sick by nature. Reason as well as health is in us only 
a momentary success and a happy accident." 1 He was 
confirmed in this blackly naturalistic view of man by 
his study of the Revolution. He came to feel with Cole- 
ridge that human nature is not a goddess in petticoats, 
but a devil in a strait- waistcoat. In that case why not 
return to the regime of the strait- waistcoat ? Since man 
is not capable of an inner check, why not seek to recover 
the outer checks, the traditional restraints, religious and 
political? But Taine would not, like others who have 
followed a similar course of reasoning, abdicate his pride 
of science and become a reactionary. 

On the contrary, the first volume of the "Origines" 
(in some respects his masterpiece) is an attack on the 
old order that alienated the true reactionaries. He set 
out to show that the abuses of the Monarchy produced 
inevitably the abuses of the Revolution, and the abuses 
of the Revolution those of the Empire. He thus offended 
in turn all parties — monarchical, radical, Napoleonic. 
He not only had to face this general disappoval, but 
suffered also in one of his cherished friendships, that 
with the Princesse Mathilde, who broke with him ab- 
ruptly on the publication of his portrait of Napoleon. 
The final impression one has of Taine is that of an in- 
creasing moral solitude. 

In cutting himself off from so much human sympathy, 
he did not even have the consolation of believing in the 
efficacy of the enormous task to which he had devoted 

1 Lit. ang., n, 158. 



246 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

twenty years of toil. " I probably made a mistake twenty 
years ago," be writes towards tbe end, " in undertaking 
tbis series of investigations ; tbey are darkening my old 
age, and I feel more and more tbat from tbe practical 
point of view tbey will be useless ; an enormous and swift 
current is carrying us away ; of wbat avail is it to write 
a memoir on its deptb and swiftness? " 1 He bad schooled 
bimself too tborougbly to see in bistory, not tbe action 
of individuals, but of certain collective causes against 
wbicb tbe individual is well-nigb powerless. We are 
always bearing in bis pbilosopby of tbe way tbe outward 
acts upon tbe inward, but rarely of tbe way tbe inward 
acts upon tbe outward. 

He evidently failed to respect sufficiently the mystery 
of personality in tbus making of it only tbe meeting- 
place and playground of outer influences. Sainte-Beuve, 
as we have seen, anxious though he was to write " This- 
toire naturelle des esprits," showed greater prudence 
when he confessed : " We shall doubtless never be able 
to treat man in exactly the same way as plants or ani- 
mals." 2 The contrary supposition has found fitting ex- 
pression in a certain school of experimental psychology. 
Emerson perceived this drift towards scientific material- 
ism and raised a cry of warning: "I see not, if one be 
once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape 
for tbe man from the links of the chain of physical 
necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must 
follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of sensual- 
ism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impos- 

1 Vie et cor., iv, 338. * N. Lundis, in, 16. 



TAINE 247 

sible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into 
every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, 
through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker 
of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, 
intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these 
high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with 
this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and can- 
not again contract ourselves to so base a state." 1 We 
may add that in the most commonplace personality 
there is a fraction, however infinitesimal, which eludes 
all attempts at analysis ; and this indefinable fraction, 
this residuum of pure and abstract liberty, not to be 
expressed in terms of time and space, increases in strict 
ratio to the man's originality. What is true of the indi- 
vidual applies equally to a race or historic period. The 
bushmen of Australia fall more readily into the categories 
of Taine than the Greeks of the age of Pericles. There 
is something in the best work of this age that is set 
above all the changing circumstances of time and place, 
and still appeals to a kindred element in us. But Taine 
is more concerned with differences than with identities. 
He has in this respect pushed to an extreme the method 
of Madame de Stael. In works like his " English Notes," 
he undertakes to define the English national type in its 
ultimate differences from other national types much after 
her fashion in " Corinne " and the " Germany." In the 
"La Fontaine," again, he tends to see in the poet the 
expression of certain French racial traits and of French 
society in the seventeenth century rather than the uni- 

1 Essay on Experience. 



248 MODEKN FRENCH CRITICISM 

versal human appeal. To treat a writer in this way is to 
run the risk of losing sight of what gives him rank and 
importance in literature. A writer, to have high literary 
standing, must combine in himself two things, neither 
of which is primarily an expression of his race and time. 
In the first place he must be unique. In the second 
place we must feel mysteriously interwoven with his 
uniqueness the presence of our common humanity. Great 
writers therefore refuse to be imprisoned in their en- 
vironment. They radiate even more than they receive 
influences. In this sense it has been said of the man of 
genius that he is a monarch who creates his subjects, 
and so is a contemporary of the future. 

It is but natural that Taine should have failed most 
signally in his " English Literature " in trying to apply his 
method to the supreme originality of Shakespeare. .We 
may object to his attempt to confine the genius of Shake- 
speare in a formula as he would a chemical gas, even 
though we may not, like Matthew Arnold, see in Shake- 
speare one who " out-tops knowledge," even as a moun- 
tain, which 

" Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place 
Spares but the cloudy border of his base 
To the foiFd searching of mortality." 

In fact, what most strikes one about Taine's method as 
applied to great writers is its extraordinary irrelevancy. 
We may imagine twin brothers, one with a superior liter- 
ary gift, the other a mediocrity. The same influences of 
race, environment and moment have acted upon them. 
They ought according to the theory to have the same 



TAINE 249 

master faculty. There is plainly an unbridgeable gap here 
between causes that are collective and general and a cause 
like the master faculty that is in the highest degree indi- 
vidual. As applied to the great Corneille, Taine's method, 
it has been said, explains everything that he had in 
common with his brother Thomas, that is, everything 
that might, without great loss, have remained unex- 
plained. All this historical setting and background was 
originally intended to bear to literary criticism about 
the relationship that the frame does to the picture ; but 
in Taine and his school, as has been pointed out, the 
frame tends to take the place of the picture. Scherer 
remarks with his usual severity that in the " Philosophy 
of Greek Art" Taine gives us two hundred pages of 
elegant and ingenious description of Greece and Greek 
life, but " take away six lines from the beginning, and 
the volume of M. Taine will be found to contain not a 
word of art and not a word of philosophy." * 

To use art and literature merely as a " sign " or " docu- 
ment " to explain a society or epoch, instead of using the 
history of the society as an aid to the understanding of 
its art and literature, is in itself a radical confusion of 
the genres. The difficulty would have been at least partly 
remedied if Taine had, for example, called his work on 
English literature by some such title as " English So- 
ciety as Reflected in its Literature." For if he does not 
always do justice to individual writers, he often does 
succeed admirably in marking the main characteristics 
of an epoch, in following out the great streams of tend- 
1 Etudes, iv, 267. 



250 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ency, in noting interactions and interdependencies. His 
logic and intellectual vigor not only show to advant- 
age here, but are precious as correcting a lack of these 
virtues in ourselves. A hundred English and American 
readers have probably received a wholesome stimulus 
from the "English Literature" for one who has been un- 
duly affected by its pseudo-scientific bias. And then, 
too, if we are to judge Taine equitably, we must make 
another most important reservation. It is true that his 
method from a purely literary point of view is one of 
the worst ever devised, but it is likewise true that he is 
often a great critic not because of this method, but in 
spite of it. He looked on himself as being above all a 
psychologist ; so far as he means by this that he applies 
science to the human soul, he is only too often pseudo- 
psychological. We simply have a harsh application of 
the esprit de geometrie to values that elude it. But 
very often, too, he forgets his system and becomes 
psychological in the same sense as Sainte-Beuve, that 
is, he shows the gift for psychological portraiture which 
the French have been cultivating for centuries and in 
which they have attained an extraordinary perfection. 
But even when he is psychological in this very legit- 
imate sense we are occasionally brought up with a jerk, 
and reminded unpleasantly that we are tethered to a 
system. 

v 

The era of scientific positivism, of which Taine is a 
chief representative, appears at present to be drawing to 
a close. The forms in which it embodied itself are coming 



TAINE 251 

to seem too dogmatic to the scientists themselves. " I 
believe that absolute, concatenated, geometrical science 
exists," 1 wrote Taineas a young man. If he had lived 
in the Middle Ages he would no doubt have believed 
that absolute and geometrical religion exists. Both the 
theologian and the dogmatic scientist are victims of 
the metaphysical illusion. Taine not only believed that 
both nature and human nature can be brought under a 
common law, but that ultimately they may be brought 
under a common formula. The single gigantic scientific 
Formula of which he has a glimpse at the apex of his 
pyramid of generalizations is the nearest equivalent in 
his work to the theologian's vision of God. " This crea- 
tive formula . . . fills time and space and remains above 
time and space. It is not comprised in them and they 
derive from it. All life is one of its moments, all being 
is one of its forms ; and the series of objects descend 
from it in accordance with indestructible necessities, 
bound together by the divine links of its golden chain. 
The indifferent, the immobile, the eternal, the all-power- 
ful- — no name exhausts it ; and when its calm and sub- 
lime face is unveiled, there is no human spirit which does 
not bow, stricken with admiration and horror. At the 
same moment our spirit is uplifted ; we forget our mor- 
tality and pettiness ; we enjoy sympathetically the infini- 
tude of our thought and participate in its grandeur." 2 

In spirit this is worthy of Marcus Aurelius and the 
other stoics at their best ; in substance it is an extreme 
example of the metaphysical illusion. Formulae are 

1 Vie et cor., I, 47. 2 Phil, classiques, 370-76. 



252 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

excellent and necessary in dealing with both the human 
and the natural law, but must always be provisional, 
because both laws lay hold upon the infinite. That is 
why, as Emerson says, truth is "so unbottleable and 
unbarrelable a commodity. ,, We need therefore to piece 
out our formulae with our intuitions; intuitions of the 
Many if we are dealing with the natural order; intui- 
tions of the One if we are dealing with man's peculiar 
domain. Wisdom for the humanist, as I have already 
said, does not lie in putting too exclusive an emphasis 
on either order of intuitions, but in mediating between 
the two orders, between vital impulse (elan vital) and 
vital control (frein vital). 

To each order of intuitions corresponds its own type 
of spontaneity. The attempt of Taine and the deter- 
minists to imprison both nature and human nature in 
their formulae is a denial of both types of spontaneity. 
As appears from a passage I have quoted from Emerson 
(p. 246) we may escape from this nightmare of intellect- 
ualism by an appeal to our intuition of the One. But 
rather than consent to have the activity of their own 
spirits reduced to a "problem of mechanics," 1 to the 
grinding of cogs and the creaking of pulleys, men are 
ready to follow those who appeal from intellectualism to 
the intuitions of the Many ; though in itself this appeal 
can result only in a decadent naturalism. To the exalta- 
tion of this type of spontaneity is due the vogue of a 
long series of philosophers from Rousseau to M. Bergson. 
Man is no longer with Bergson, as with Taine, a "living 

1 Lit. ang., I, p. xxxii. 



TAINE 253 

geometry," whose formula may be worked out mathe- 
matically and whose future may be predicted from his 
present, in such a way as to eliminate time as an effective 
factor. This, says M. Bergson, is to impose mechanism 
upon organism, the geometric upon the vital order. 1 For 
the organic, " time is the very stuff of reality," 2 accom- 
panied as it is by a "constant gushing-forth of novelties," 
unpredictable from the platform of intellect. In fact we 
can get a glimpse of reality, says M. Bergson, giving a 
new form to the Kousseauistic strife between head and 
heart, only by twisting ourselves about and " intuiting " 
the creative flux. 3 Instead of inviting us, like Plato, to 
use our intellectual distinctions as rounds in the ladder 
that leads to the intuition of the One, he would have us 
turn our backs on our intellects in order that we may 
peer down into the vast swirling depths of the evolu- 
tionary process. He does not recognize the potentiality 
in man of a spontaneity that resists the flux and imposes 
upon it a human purpose. M. Bergson sees no escape 
from the frenzied intellectualism of Taine and his con- 
temporaries save in an equally frenzied romanticism; 
and herein of course he agrees with James and the prag- 
matists. We may note in passing that James not only 
defends the romantic attitude directly, but strives to 
discredit the word classical by adopting Taine's misap- 
prehension of it, and making it synonymous with the 
scholastic and dryly rational. 4 As a matter of fact the 
intellectualism of Taine is much nearer to being clas- 

1 VEvolution creatrice, 247. 2 Ibid., 4. 8 Ibid., 175. 

4 See article by James in The Nation (New York), March 31, 1910. 



254 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

sical as he and James misunderstand the word than 
is the intuitive good sense of a Horace, let us say, or a 
Boileau. 

VI 

Our impatience at the exaggerated determinism of 
Taine and his disciples should be tempered by the reflec- 
tion that it was perhaps only a necessary recoil from an 
equal exaggeration in the opposite direction. Mediseval 
religion tended to isolate man altogether from nature and 
from his fellows, to raise him above time and space, and 
to regard him as entirely dependent upon divine grace 
and his own free will. The saint strove to attain perfec- 
tion by the repression of all the natural instincts. The 
extravagances of the romances of chivalry which Cer- 
vantes satirized, are only another expression of this cult 
of the heroic personality in defiance of all the limita- 
tions of the real. Taine, on the contrary, has devoted 
extraordinary powers of analysis to showing the mani- 
fold ways in which the individual will is limited and 
conditioned by natural law, and to demonstrating how 
" every living thing is held in the iron grasp of neces- 
sity. "* He also undertakes to prove that man is circum- 
scribed in his institutions no less than in his individuality 
by this natural necessity ; these too are historical products, 
largely related to their surroundings, and to be modified, 
if at all, only by slow process of evolution. He is, there- 
fore, perfectly logical in his attack upon the French 
Revolution; for at bottom the revolutionary spirit is 
only a transformation of the old idealism and its mis- 

1 Lit. ang.j v, 411. 



TAINE 255 

application to politics. The Jacobin, like the mediaeval 
doctor, substitutes an ideal entity for living, breathing 
men, lets f ormulae come between himself and direct con- 
tact with reality, and believes of human institutions as 
his mediaeval predecessor had believed of individuals, that 
they may be made over with reference to an abstract 
model by a mere fiat of the will. 

Naturalism has thus worked a far-reaching transfor- 
mation in all departments of thought by its twofold 
instrument of historical sympathy and scientific analysis. 
In literary criticism, for instance, it will hardly be pos- 
sible after Sainte-Beuve and Taine to return to the point 
of view of an older type of critic — to treat a book as 
though it had " fallen like a meteorite from the sky," 1 
and judge it by comparison with an aesthetic code, itself 
constructed on a priori grounds like a mediaeval creed. 
In general, as a result of the labors of the naturalists, 
it will not be easy for men to neglect as they once did 
the element of change and relativity. They are not 
likely to revert to the crude dualism, the mechanical 
opposition of soul and body, the ascetic distrust of 
nature that marked the mediaeval period. In short, the 
great naturalistic movement which extends from the 
first thinkers of the Kenaissance to Taine will be seen 
in the, retrospect to have been a necessary reaction 
against the excesses of the idealism of the past, a neces- 
sary preparation for a saner idealism in the future. 

Taine's work will always be highly significant in the 
history of this movement, highly expressive of the "mo* 

1 Flaubert, Correspondance, in, 196. 



256 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ment" at which it probably culminated. He had in the 
fullest measure the " spirit of his own time," to borrow 
Voltaire's distinction ; it is less certain that he combined 
it with that "spirit which passes to the remotest pos- 
terity." It is already apparent at all events that his 
criticism is not going to wear so well as that of Sainte- 
Beuve. 



IX 



RENAN * 



Renan says that his purpose in his " Souvenirs " is 
not so much to narrate the incidents of his youth as to 
trace his intellectual origins and " transmit to others his 
theory of the world." 2 The intellectual life he has thus 
recorded, extraordinarily rich in itself, derives an added 
interest from the fact that it is so largely representative 
of his age. He speaks in one of his essays of la pens ee 
delicate, fay ante, insaisis sable du xix* siecle. 3 These 
are the very epithets that best describe his own thought. 
He is a Proteus, whom no one has yet succeeded in bind- 
ing. It would be possible to do justice to him, says 
Sainte-Beuve, only in a Platonic dialogue ; but who, he 
adds, could be found to write it ? 4 If Renan is thus subtle 
and many-sided, it is because he embodies so perfectly 
the spirit of modern criticism. The first step in under- 
standing him is to have clearly in mind the difference 
between this new critical ideal and the old. The critic's 
business as once conceived was to judge with reference 
to a definite standard and then to enforce his decisions 
by his personal weight and authority. The nature of 

1 Most of this chapter is reprinted from the introduction to my edition 
of the Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, with the kind permission of D. C. 
Heath & Co. 

2 Souvenirs, p. iii. 8 Dialogues philosophiques, 299. 
4 Nouvelle correspondance, 175. 



258 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the reaction against this conception is summed up in a 
phrase of Carlyle's : " We must see before we begin to 
oversee." Flexibility of intelligence and breadth of sym- 
pathy come more and more to take the place of authority 
and judgment as the chief virtues of the critic. Mere 
judging — " the blaming of this or the praising of that," 
says Renan, "is the mark of a narrow method." 1 If 
the weakness of the old criticism was its narrowness and 
dogmatism, the danger of the new is that in its endeavor 
to embrace the world in a universal sympathy, it should 
forget the task of judging altogether. Renan would rest 
his criticism on the " excluding of all exclusiveness," 2 on 
an intellectual hospitality so vast as to find room for 
all the contradictory aspects of reality. " Formerly," he 
says, " every man had a system ; he lived and died by it; 
now we pass successively through all systems, or, better 
still, understand them all at once." 3 No one was ever 
more penetrated by the teaching of the Hegelian logic, 
that a truth, to become true, needs to be completed by 
its contrary. At first glance he would seem to be a new 
kind of skeptic, who, instead of doubting everything, 
affirms everything — which is, of course, only an indi- 
rect way of denying the absolute truth of anything. Yet 
we could fall into no more serious error than to suppose 
that Renan is a real skeptic. " Woe to the man," he ex- 
claims, " who does not contradict himself at least once 
a day." 4 But there are some points on which he never 

1 Avenir de la science, 199. 2 Avenir de la science, 66. 

8 Dialogues phil., p. ix. 

4 Etude sur VEcclesiaste, 24. Renan ascribes this sentiment to the 
Hebrew writer, but in such a way as to make it his own. 



KENAN 259 

contradicts himself, however much they may be overlaid 
in his later writings by irony and paradox. We can 
come at these essential affirmations more readily if we 
turn to that remarkable work of his youth, " L' Avenir de 
la science," recollecting that though written in 1848 it did 
not appear until 1890, with a preface in which Renan 
avers that at bottom he has not changed in the interval. 
In the peculiar fervor of the cult it renders to science, 
the book marks a moment, not in the life of Renan merely, 
but of the century. We have but to listen to the dithy- 
rambic tones in which he speaks of science to see that 
he has turned away from the faith of his childhood only 
to become the priest of another altar : " Science, then, is 
a religion ; science alone in the future will make creeds ; 
science can alone solve for man the everlasting problems 
the solution of which his nature imperiously demands." 1 
After humanity has been scientifically organized, science 
will proceed to " organize God." 2 



Renan has evidently carried over to science all the 
mental habits of Catholicism. As Sainte-Beuve remarks, 
"In France we shall remain Catholics long after we 
have ceased to be Christians." 3 Renan, indeed, may be 
best defined as a scientist and positivist with a Catholic 
imagination. For instance, he arrives at the conception 
of scientific dogma, 4 of an infallible scientific papacy, 5 
of a scientific hell and inquisition, 6 of resurrection and 

1 Avenir de la science, 108. 2 Ibid., 37. 

8 Nouvelle correspondance, 123. 4 Avenir de la science, 344 and 442. 

5 Dialogues phil., 112. • Dialogues phil., 113 and 120. 



260 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

immortality through science, 1 of scientific martyrs. 2 
When scientific progress is at stake, he is even ready 
to resort to the Jesuitical doctrine that the end justifies 
the means. "Let us learn not to be severe with those 
who have employed a little trickery and what is usually 
known as corruption, if they really have as their object the 
greater good of humanity." 3 He promises us that if we 
imitate him we may hope to be, like himself, sanctified 
through science : " If all were as cultivated as I, all 
would be, like me, happily incapable of wrongdoing. 
Then it would be true to say : ye are gods and sons of 
the Most High." 4 

Renan thus has a special gift for surrounding science 
with an atmosphere of religious emotion. Like Lucre* 
tius of old, he lends to analysis an imaginative splendor 
that it does not in itself possess. In this way, he at- 
tracts many who would have been repelled by a hard 
and dry positivism. They can have in reading him the- 
pleasant illusion that, after all, they are making no 
serious sacrifice in substituting science for religion. 
" God, Providence, soulj" says Renan, " good old words, 
a bit clumsy, but expressive and respectable, which sci- 
ence will interpret in a sense ever more refined, but 
will never replace to advantage." 5 In other words, all 
the terms of the old idealism are to be retained, but by 
a system of subtle equivocation they are to receive new 
meanings. Thus a great deal is said about the " soul," 

1 Dialogues phil, 134-35. 2 Ibid., 129. 

8 Avenir de la science, 351. 4 Ibid., 476. 

6 Avenir de la science, 476, and Etudes d'hist. rel., 419. 



RENAN 261 

but, as used by Renan, it has come to be a sort of 
function of the brain. "Those will understand me who 
have once breathed the air of the other world and 
tasted the nectar of the ideal." 1 When this is taken in 
connection with the whole passage where it occurs, we 
discover that " tasting the nectar of the ideal " does 
not signify much more than reading a certain number 
of German monographs. Men, he tells us, are immortal, 
— that is, " in their works," or " in the memory of 
those who have loved them," or "in the memory of 
God." 2 Elsewhere we learn that by God he means 
merely the " category of the ideal." By a further atten- 
uation, the ideal has ceased to be the immediate per- 
sonal perception of a spiritual order superior to the 
phenomenal world — of idealism in this sense there is 
more in one sentence of Emerson than in scores of 
pages of Renan. It is simply the faith in scientific 
progress reinforced, as we have seen, in his own case, 
by a religious sensibility of unusual depth and richness. 
His creed, as he himself formulates it, is " the cult of 
the ideal, the negation of the supernatural, the experi- 
mental search for truth." 3 In spite of the first article 
of this creed, Renan is like other positivists in his ex- 
treme distrust of the unaided insight or intuition of the 
individual. We should note how careful he is to rest 
his revolt from Catholicism, not on the testimony of the 
reason or the conscience, but on the outer fact. 4 

The belief was once held, and in France with a firmer 

1 Avenir de la science, 56. 2 Dialogues phil., 139. 

8 Dialogues phil., 1. 4 See Souvenirs, 250 and 297 f. 



262 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

assurance than elsewhere, that truth might be attained 
by abstract reasoning. In Malebranche's dialogue, The- 
odore and Ariste shut themselves up in their room with 
drawn curtains so as to consult more effectually the 
inner oracle, and then start out from this luminous 
proposition: Le neant n' a point de proprietes. Renan, 
for his part, will be satisfied with nothing less than the 
entire overthrow of apriorism and metaphysical assump- 
tion. He regards "the slightest bit of scientific research" 
as more to the purpose than " fifty years of metaphys- 
ical meditation." * To be sure, every man has a right to 
his philosophy, but this philosophy is only his personal 
dream of the infinite, and has no objective value apart 
from the scientific data it happens to contain. 2 Super- 
ficial readers of Renan are disconcerted when they learn 
that nothing he had done gave him so much satisfaction 
as his " Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum," 3 the most 
aridly erudite of all his works, the one into which he has 
put the least of himself, according to ordinary standards. 
But what, Renan might reply, is a mere dream of the in- 
finite, however artistically expressed, compared with the 
honor of contributing even a single brick to that edifice 
of positive knowledge which is being reared by science, 
and is destined to take the place of the air-palaces of 
the metaphysicians? 

Renan is careful, then, to found his study of man 
not on introspection, but on the positive evidence of 

1 Avenir de la science, 163. 2 Dialogues phil., 240, etc. 

8 A bit of paper found in Renan's desk after his death had written 
upon it: "De tout ce que j'ai fait, c'est le Corpus que j'aime le mieux." 



RENAN 263 

history and language. " There is no science of the in- 
dividual soul." 1 This one phrase contains the denial of 
the old religion and psychology ; but he offers to substi- 
tute for this traditional idea of human nature a definite 
image of humanity as it is revealed in its past. " The 
only science of a being in a constant state of develop- 
ment is its history." 2 History, therefore, rises at once 
into immense importance as the means by which man 
is to arrive at the necessary truths about his own nature. 

n 

Renan himself was so admirably endowed for his- 
torical study that in thus exalting it he may be sus- 
pected of viewing life too exclusively from the angle 
of his own special faculty. "All the misfortunes of 
men," says the dancing-master in Moliere, "all the 
fatal reverses that fill the world's annals, the blunders 
of statesmen and the shortcomings of great captains 
arise from not knowing how to dance." We cannot, 
however, easily overrate the importance of the revolu- 
tion that took place early in the last century in the 
manner of understanding history. Renan himself was 
one of the first to see in this new historical sense the 
chief acquisition and distinctive originality of the nine- 
teenth century. 3 "History," says Sainte-Beuve, "that 
general taste and aptitude of our age, falls heir, in ef- 
fect, to all the other branches of human culture." 4 A 
few believers in direct vision, like Emerson, protested: 

1 Dialogues phil., 265. 2 Avenir de la science, 132. 

8 Essais de morale et de critique, 104. 4 N. lundis, i, 103. 



264 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

" Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of 
the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criti- 
cisms." But in this matter Emerson's voice was that of 
one crying in the wilderness. The fascination of what 
he calls " masquerading in the faded wardrobe of the 
past " has made itself felt more and more, until it has 
come, in such forms as the historical novel, to appeal tc 
the veriest Philistine. 

In itself, this imaginative and sympathetic under- 
standing of the past was worth acquiring, even at the 
cost of some one-sidedness. The old-fashioned historian 
had an entirely inadequate notion of the variable ele- 
ment in human nature. He had before him in writing 
a sort of image of man in the abstract which he sup- 
posed to hold good for all particular men "from China 
to Peru " ; he used very similar terms in speaking of 
Louis XIV and a king of the Merovingian dynasty, 
and judged them in the main by the same standard. A 
historian like Renan, on the contrary, uses all his art 
in bringing out the differences that separate men in 
time and space. He has little to say about man in gen- 
eral, but he makes us feel the ways in which an Athen- 
ian of the time of the Antonines had ceased to resem- 
ble an Athenian of the age of Pericles, how the mental 
attitude of a Greek differed from that of a Jew, in 
what respects an inhabitant of Rome was unlike an 
inhabitant of Antioch. "The essence of criticism," he 
tells us, "is the ability to enter into modes of life 
different from our own." 1 In this definition he favors 

1 Souvenirs, 87. 



RENAN 265 

once more his own talent, which excels in nothing so 
much as in seizing and rendering the finest shades of 
thought and feeling, in making the most subtle dis- 
tinctions. He has in a high degree what he himself 
calls " the direct intuition of the sentiments and pas- 
sions of the past." l For this gift of historical divination 
there is needed, in addition to exact scholarship, a per- 
fect blending of those feminine powers of comprehen- 
sion and sympathy to which Goethe has paid tribute at 
the end of the second Faust. Renan himself is fond of 
insisting on this feminine side of his nature. " I have 
been reared by women and priests. In this fact lies the 
explanation both of my virtues and my faults. ... In 
my manner of feeling I am three-fourths a woman." 2 
Elsewhere he ascribes this predominance of feminine 
traits to the entire Celtic race, and especially to his own 
branch of it. 3 

With his native aptitude for noting minute changes, 
Renan was peculiarly fitted to receive the new theories 
of evolution. The German scholarship and speculation, 
which he did so much to make known in France, are 
permeated by this idea of gradual growth and develop- 
ment. The old psychology had studied man from the 
static point of view ; in the philosophy of Renan, even 
God evolves. For him, the great modern achievement 
is to " have substituted the category of becoming for 
the category of being, the conception of the relative 

^ x Essais de morale et de critique, 110. 

2 Feuilles detachees, pp. xxx-xxxi. Cf . also Souvenirs, 113 f . 
8 Essais de morale et de critique, 385. 



266 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

for the conception of the absolute, movement for im- 
mobility." 1 One who has found, like Renan, how much 
may be explained by the historical method, is tempted 
to use it to explain everything. He is curiously loath to 
grant that a work of art, for example, may be valuable 
by virtue of its universal human truth, and not simply 
as the mirror of a particular type of man or civilization. 
"It is not Homer who is beautiful," he says, "but 
Homeric life, the phase in the existence of humanity 
described by Homer." "If the Ossianic hymns of Mac- 
pherson were authentic, we should have to place them 
alongside of Homer; as soon as it is proved that they 
are by a poet of the eighteenth century, they have 
only a very trifling value." 2 Kenan's historical finesse 
does not compare favorably here with the vigorous good 
sense of Dr. Johnson, who remarks characteristically of 
Ossian : " Sir, a man might write such stuff forever if 
he would only abandon his mind to it." 

It would be possible to multiply passages from Renan 
to show that his attitude towards literature is not pri- 
marily literary but historical or philological. He con- 
fesses that he valued literature for a time only to please 
Sainte-Beuve, who had had a great deal of influence 
upon him. 3 No worse heresy from the point of view of 
the lover of letters was ever uttered than when Renan 
said that " literary history is destined to take the place 
in great part of the direct reading of the works of the 
human spirit" ; 4 or when he declared that he would "ex- 

1 Averroes, p. ii. 2 Ibid., 190 f. 

3 Souvenirs, 354. 4 Avenir de la science, 226. 



RENAN 267 

change all the beautiful prose of Livy for some of the 
documents that he had before his eyes in writing his 
history." 1 

in 

It was Renan's ambition, however, to be something 
more than a mere historian and philologist. It should 
be remembered that the second article of his creed is 
the negation of the supernatural, "that strange disease," 
as he describes it elsewhere, " that to the shame of civil- 
ization has not yet disappeared from humanity." 2 All 
his early training had turned him towards the study of 
religion. After his conversion from Catholicism to sci- 
ence, there was superadded the desire to apply his new 
faith, to prove that the positive methods of history and 
philology are adequate to explain what has always been 
held to be wholly beyond them. Religion assumes that 
there is a realm of mystery into which the ordinary rea- 
son is unable to enter. There can be no real triumph 
for the rationalist until this main assumption of religion 
is attacked and discredited. It was with all this in mind 
that Renan wrote when a very young man : " The most 
important book of the nineteenth century should have 
as its title i A Critical History of the Origins of Christ- 
ianity.' " 3 Renan devoted over thirty years of his own 
life to the accomplishment of this great task. The result 
is embodied in the seven volumes of his " Origines du 
Christianisme," and the five complementary volumes of 
his " Histoire du peuple d'Israel." These works, though 

1 Essais de morale et de critique, 36. 2 Ibid., 48. 

8 Avenir de la science, 279. 



268 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

not perhaps the most important of the century, are, at 
all events, the most considerable that have appeared in 
France for one or two generations. 

It is quite beyond the scope of the present study to 
discuss in detail Renan's treatment of the grave ques- 
tions that necessarily confront a historian of Christianity. 
The method of this treatment is evidently borrowed from 
Germany. He has pressed the French talent for expres- 
sion into the service of German research, and thrown 
into general circulation ideas that had previously been 
the property of a few specialists. German scholars, how- 
ever, had left to scriptural exegesis at least a semblance 
of special privilege. Renan's work is significant by the 
very boldness with which he abolishes the distinction 
between sacred and profane learning, and puts the nar- 
ratives of the Old and New Testaments on precisely the 
same footing as those of Livy and Herodotus. The Bible, 
instead of being absolutely inspired and all of a piece, 
thus becomes purely human and historical and bears 
the impress of all the changiug circumstances of time 
and place. The book of Ecclesiastes was once thought 
to be the word of God; Renan sees in it only the "phi- 
losophy of a disillusioned old bachelor." 1 

It is usual to contrast this historical method of Renan 
with the irreligion of the eighteenth century, founded 
entirely on reasoning and often as intolerant in temper 
as the dogma it attacked. This temper is well exemplified 
by Voltaire's warfare upon the supernatural, especially 
by the famous watchword of his crusade upon Catholi- 

1 Dialogues phil. t 27. 



RENAN 269 

cism, Ecrasez Vinfame. The militant atheism of former 
times was, as has often been remarked, a sort of inverted 
faith. " There is no God, and Harriet Martineau is his 
prophet." We can accept the contrast between Renan 
and this type of disbeliever, provided we remember that 
Renan's philosophy also carried with it no small share 
of dogmatic rationalism, and something, too, of the 
mocking irreverence that in France, at all events, nearly 
always accompanies it. This element comes to the sur- 
face more and more as he grows older. There are even 
moments when he deserves the epithet his enemies have 
given him, — that of an " unctuous Voltaire." This flip- 
pancy in dealing with religious matters is often amusing 
enough in itself, but one would have preferred to see a 
man like Renan follow the counsel of the ancient sage 
and "not speculate about the highest things in light- 
ness of heart." 

We cannot be too careful to distinguish these differ- 
ent elements in a nature as complex as Renan's. He 
has some points in common with Voltaire, and still 
more with the critics of Germany. On the other hand, 
he resembles by his sentimental cult for Christianity a 
Catholic apologist like Chateaubriand. It was to this 
last trait that he owed much of his power to influence 
his own generation. For religion, even after it has lost 
all effective hold on the reason and character, still lin- 
gers in the sensibility. When it has ceased to appeal to 
us as truth, it continues to appeal to us as beauty. As 
Renan puts it, "We are offended by the dogmas of 
Catholicism and delighted by its old churches." 1 We 

1 Dialogues phil, 328. 



270 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

are thrilled with emotion by mediaeval architecture, by 
the poetry of Christian rites and ceremonies, by the 
odor of incense, or, like Renan himself, by the Canticles 
to the Virgin. 1 This mood may be termed religiosity, 
and is not to be confused with real religion, with which 
it has no necessary connection. 

Renan, then, came at the precise moment when men 
were most divided between this sentimental yearning 
towards the past and their intellectual acceptance of the 
new order. The heart refused to acquiesce in the con- 
clusions of the head. This struggle between the head 
and the heart was especially common towards the mid- 
dle of the century, so much so that, according to Sainte- 
Beuve, it had become a fashionable pose. 2 

" Ma raison re'volte'e 
Essaie en vain de croire et mon coeur de douter." 3 

The religious sentiment had still been strong enough 
in the case of Chateaubriand and a considerable num- 
ber of his contemporaries to carry with it the reluctant 
reason. But fifty years later the balance had turned in 
favor of the modern spirit, and many men were pre- 
paring to bid the religious forms of the past a tender 
and regretful farewell. Renan is their spokesman when 
he says that " the belief we have had should never be a 
bond. We have paid our debt to it when we have care- 
fully wrapped it in the purple shroud in which slumber 
the gods that are dead." 4 He sets out then in his 

1 Souvenirs, 65. * N. lundis, v, 14. 

8 Alfred de Musset, UEspoir en Dieu. See also for the same mood 
parts of Mussefc's Rolla. 4 Souvenirs, 72. 



RENAN 271 

" Origines " to weave the shroud of Christianity, and 
to give it — so far as it implies faith in the supernat- 
ural — a sympathetic and respectful burial. We have 
already spoken of the faculty that specially fitted him 
for this enterprise. No one knew better than he how 
to gild positivism with religiosity and throw around 
the operations of the scientific intellect a vague aroma 
of the infinite. II donne aux hommes de sa genera- 
tion ce qu'ils desirent, des bonbons qui sentent VinfinL 1 
Religion that has thus taken refuge in the sensibility 
becomes largely a matter of literary and artistic enjoy- 
ment. This is evidently so in the case of Chateau- 
briand, and it is not difficult to detect in Renan the 
same epicurean flavor. He tells us that he has a " keen 
relish " 2 for the character of the founder of Christian- 
ity. He speaks in another passage of " savoring the de- 
lights of the religious sentiment." 3 Perhaps nothing 
so offends the serious reader of the " Vie de Jesus " as 
Renan' s assumption that the highest praise he can give 
Jesus is to say that he satisfies the aesthetic sense. He 
multiplies in speaking of him such adjectives as doux> 
beau, exquis, charmant, ravissant, delicieux. 

But we have just seen that this religiosity, however 
little it may be to our liking, was exactly suited to the 
taste of a large contemporary public. It was the time- 
liness of the " Vie de Jesus," even more than its in- 
trinsic merit, that won for it its extraordinary success, 

1 Doudan, Lettres, iv, 143. The whole passage on Renan and his time 
is worth reading. 

2 Souvenirs, 312. 8 Avenir de la science, 248. 



272 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

and made of its publication, as Scherer has said, " one 
of the events of the century." 1 Sixty thousand copies 
of the work were called for in the first five months, 
and it was soon translated into many languages. The 
orthodox, Protestants as well as Catholics, saw in it, in 
spite of the outward forms of respect in which it 
clothed itself, the most insidious and deadly attack 
that religion had yet sustained, and within a year or 
two of its appearance hundreds of hooks, pamphlets 
and magazine articles had been poured forth in reply. 2 
The Bishop of Marseilles had the church bells tolled 
every afternoon at three against Renan, the Anti- 
christ; Pope Pius IX called him the "European blas- 
phemer." In some cases polemic was reinforced by 
calumny. Thus it was reported that the wealthy Jew, 
M. de Rothschild, had paid Renan a bribe of a million 
francs for writing his attack on Christianity. 3 

Without venturing into this dangerous region of 
theological controversy, we can see at this distance that 
Renan is not at his best in the " Vie de Jesus." Some 
would go even further, and say, in the words of Fleury, 
that " any one who thinks he can improve on the Gospel 
narrative does not understand it." Renan chiefly ex- 
cels in rendering, by his art of delicate shadings, the 
element of relativity in the records of the past ; whereas 
Jesus, as Arnold expresses it, "is, in the jargon of 
modern philosophy, an absolute; we cannot explain, 

1 Etudes sur la litterature contemporaine, vin, 108. 
2 For a partial list see Milsand, Bibliographie des publications relatives 
au livre de M. Renan, Vie de Jesus (1864). 
8 Feuilles detachees, p. xxii. 



KENAN 273 

cannot get behind him and above him, cannot command 
him." The historical method is most serviceable when 
it is brought to bear on a work like the Apocalypse, or 
on an event like the persecution of Nero. But it is not 
what is needed to make us feel the sheer spiritual ele- 
vation of Jesus. It fails as conspicuously as it does 
when applied by Taine, in his "English Literature," to the 
eminent personality of Shakespeare. Neither Jesus, nor 
Shakespeare, it would seem, is to be accounted for by 
any theory of environment, or by the convergent effect 
of any number of " influences." 

Kenan's age resembled our own in that it was ex- 
traordinarily strong in its sense of what the individual 
owes to society, and extraordinarily weak in its sense of 
what he owes to himself ; and so, in obedience to the 
time-spirit, Kenan reduces the mission of Jesus, so far 
as possible, to sentimental and humanitarian effusions. 
The masculine religion of the will is almost entirely 
sacrificed in his narrative to the feminine religion of 
the heart. But, as Sainte-Beuve remarks, two great fam- 
ilies of Christians may be distinguished from the first — 
on the one hand the "gentle and the tender," and on 
the other the " resolute and the strong." * The traits 
that were thus separated in the followers were united in 
the founder. As a result of Kenan's failure to recog- 
nize this fact, there is a real incoherency in his picture 
of Jesus. It is not made clear to us how the " delicate 
and amiable moralist" of Galilee becomes the "sombre 
giant of the last days." 

1 Port-Royal, I, 217. 



274 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Renan can scarcely conceal his dislike for Saint 
Paul, whose interest is evidently centred in the spiritual 
life of the individual, and who cannot, by any device 
of historical interpretation, be made into a humani- 
tarian. He calls him the second founder of Christianity, 
but he has little sympathy for the distinctive features 
of the Pauline religion, its haunting sense of sin and 
the stress it lays on the struggle between a lower and 
a higher self, between a law of the flesh and a law 
of the spirit. " Wretched man that I am!" exclaims 
Saint Paul, " who shall deliver me from the body of 
this death?" Renan, for his part, likes to remind us 
that he is the fellow countryman of the Breton Pelagius, 
who taught, in opposition to the orthodox church 
fathers, the natural goodness of human nature. A 
Christian (in the old-fashioned sense of the term) would 
see in all this a proof that Renan was lacking in some 
of the essentials of the inner life. It is, at all events, a 
curious example of his determination to view everything 
from the narrow angle of philology. " I confess," he 
says, "that the dogma of original sin is the one for 
which I have least relish. There is no other dogma that 
rests like it on a needle's point. The story of the sin of 
Adam is in only one of the two versions which alter- 
nate with one another in making up the book of Genesis. 
If the Elohistic version alone had come down to us, 
there would be no original sin. The Jehovistic story of 
the fall . . . was never noticed by the ancient people of 
Israel. Paul first drew from it the frightful dogma which 
for centuries has filled humanity with gloom and terror." 1 

1 Feuilles detachees, 375-76. 



KENAN 275 

Kenan's positivism is also well illustrated by his atti- 
tude towards miracles. He is nowhere so dogmatic as in 
the confidence with which he decides what is " natural " 
and what is " supernatural," and rejects forthwith every- 
thing that cannot be properly tested in the laboratory 
of M. Berthelot. As though, with our infinitesimal frag- 
ment of experience, we really knew whether the ordi- 
nary " law " may not be at times superseded and held 
in abeyance by a higher " law " ! In the " Vie de 
Jesus" he occasionally resorts to the theory of pious 
fraud. Much scandal was caused by his suggestion that 
Lazarus deliberately planned and acted out the scene of 
his coming to life with a view to increasing Christ's 
fame as a thaumaturgist. Elsewhere he inclines rather 
to see in the miraculous the distortion of some natural 
incident. For example, the story of the Pentecost and 
the tongues of fire probably had its origin in the light- 
ning flashes of a violent thunderstorm. 1 Paul, overcome 
by heat and fatigue, was suffering from cerebral con- 
gestion, accompanied by an attack of ophthalmia, and 
so imagined that he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. 2 
The doctrine of the resurrection — one, as Kenan says, 
in which the whole future of Christianity was involved 
— grew out of a hallucination of Mary Magdalene, 3 etc. 

Positivist though he is in all these ways, Renan still 
retains in his thought many traces of the romanticism 
he was so careful to banish from his style. Hence an 
occasional lack of objectivity and inability to get away 
from himself, a tendency to honor the historical person- 
1 Les Apotres, 62. 2 Ibid., 180 ff. 8 Ibid., 8 ff. 



276 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ages whom he admires by ascribing to them his own 
qualities. He has put many of his own traits into his 
portraits of Jesus and Marcus Aurelius. He himself 
inclines more and more to ironical detachment, and is 
unwilling to think that Jesus could have been denied 
the same superiority. " Jesus had in the highest degree 
what we regard as the essential virtue of a distinguished 
person — I mean the gift of smiling at his own work, 
of rising superior to it, of not allowing himself to be 
haunted by it." * Renan pursues his romantic dream 
through the outer circumstance and sometimes subor- 
dinates the outer circumstance to it. In his unsuccessful 
electoral campaign of 1869, only a year before the 
Franco-Prussian War, he advised a reduction of the 
army. A real statesman would have sacrificed his hu- 
manitarian vision of peace, in case he happened to have 
one, to the actual danger of war which was already 
patent to a careful observer. The Celtic race, according 
to Renan, has ever tended to "take its dreams for 
realities." " The essential element of the poetical life of 
the Celt is adventure, that is to say, the pursuit of the 
unknown, the unending quest after the ever-fleeting 
object of desire." 2 Renan himself has found a relation 
between these racial traits and his own romanticism 
and love of intellectual adventure. He arrives at few 
certainties in his studies on religion, but he makes up 
for these gaps in our positive information by a surpris- 
ing fertility in hypothesis. There is something stimu- 
lating in the very freedom with which he handles ideas 

1 V Antichrist, 102. a Essais de morale et de critique, 386. 



KENAN 277 

and events, or, as some might say, in his lack of intel- 
lectual prudence and sobriety. A person intellectually 
prudent can only marvel at the boldness with which 
Renan and Taine launch forth into some subject like 
Buddhism 1 — vast, obscure, imperfectly known as yet 
even to the specialist — and reduce it all to a few gen- 
eralizations as fallacious often as they are plausible. 
" Nature," says Emerson, u resents generalizing, and 
insults the philosopher in every moment with a million 
of fresh particulars." Renan, who has made popular so 
many ideas on race psychology, especially on the psy- 
chology of the Semite, asserts, among other things, 
that the " desert is monotheistic." Yet the "particulars" 
that tend to disprove this statement were collected dur- 
ing his own lifetime and embodied in the "Corpus" of 
which he himself was the founder. 

It is instructive to compare Renan's method with 
that of a real skeptic like Sainte-Beuve, to note Sainte- 
Beuve's care to select a subject that involves no leap 
into unknown places, and then the invincible caution 
with which he advances, exploring every foot of the 
way. To hear Renan speak of Saint Paul one would 
imagine that he had known him personally. This "ugly 
little Jew," as he informs us, "was short of stature, 
thickset, and bent. He had a small, bald head, oddly 
set on heavy shoulders. His pale face was almost over- 
grown by a thick beard ; he had an aquiline nose, keen 
eyes, black eyebrows that met over the forehead." 2 

1 Kenan's essay on Buddhism is contained in his Nouvelles etudes d'his- 
toire religieuse ; that of Taine in his Nouveaux essais de critique et d'histoire. 

2 Souvenirs , 66, and Les Apotres, 170. 



278 MODERN FKENCH CRITICISM 

Sainte-Beuve had seen Chateaubriand for a number of 
years in the drawing-room of Madame Recamier, yet he 
devotes a special appendix of his work on Chateau- 
briand to discussing the color of his eyes, and then 
only to arrive at the melancholy conclusion that we 
must be resigned to say of Chateaubriand's eyes as of 
the color of Mary Stuart's hair and so many other 
things : Que sais-je f % 

But we must not linger so long on these doubtful 
aspects of Kenan's genius as to forget the ways in 
which he is really eminent. Future historians of Christ- 
ianity may arrive at conclusions entirely different from 
his regarding those events in its records that transcend 
ordinary human experience. They may avoid some of 
the faults that come from his romanticism and abuse 
of conjecture. But we can be sure that no student of 
the Bible will be taken seriously hereafter who is with- 
out the sense of historical development ; and for im? 
parting this historical sense, Kenan is, as we have seen, 
an incomparable master. 

IV 

Kenan was so ardent a believer in evolution that it 
is only fair to apply to him his own method, and inquire 
in what way he himself evolved. He describes himself in 
his autobiography as a " bundle of contradictions." 2 
One of the contradictions which he possibly had in his 
mind is that between the end of his life and its begin- 
ning. Some allusions have already been made to the 

1 Chateaubriand et son groupe litteraire, n, 404. ' Souvenirs, 73. 



KENAN 279 

character of this change. Renan had always been abun- 
dantly provided with the cheerfulness that is one of the 
marks of a rich and resourceful nature ; but this cheer- 
fulness is something quite distinct from the ironical 
" g a yety " of his old age, in such striking contrast with 
the serious, almost solemn tone of a youthful work like 
"L'Avenir de la science." In one of the articles of this 
early period he makes an indignant attack on Beranger 
for his cult of the Dieu des bonnes gens y the easy- 
going divinity who smiles indulgently on the failings 
of Gallic human nature. 1 At about the same time, he 
refers to gayety as that " strange forgetf ulness of the 
human lot " ; 2 and so we are surprised when he an- 
nounces to us some twenty years later that, after all, 
this " ancient Gallic gayety is perhaps the prof oundest 
of philosophies." In a public address, he exhorts his 
hearers to " teach all nations to laugh in French. It is 
the sanest and most philosophical thing in the world. 
French comic songs are good too. I once said hard 
things about the Dieu des bonnes gens; mon Dieu, 
how mistaken I was. . . . Did not someone say that 
God took more pleasure in the oaths of a French sol- 
dier than in the prayers of the ministers of certain 
Puritan sects? We enter by gayety into the deepest 
views of Providence." 3 

Kenan's own account of this change is simple enough : 
he was of mixed descent, and the light, mocking Gascon 
had got the better of the serious Breton in his nature. 4 

1 See Questions contemporaines, 461 ff. 8 Feuilles detachees, 263-264. 

2 Essais de morale et de critique, 383. 4 Souvenirs, 141. 



280 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

We might, however, miss much of the significance of 
his life if we took this explanation too seriously. We 
should rather remember that Renan is a man over 
whose whole being the intellect reigned supreme, and 
then ask ourselves what is the philosophy that goes 
with this predominance of intellect. " The first dan- 
gerous symptom I report," says Emerson, " is the levity 
of intellect, as if it were fatal to earnestness to know 
much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know. 
. . . How respectable is earnestness on every platform ! 
But intellect kills it." Renan begins by regarding the 
intellect with religious earnestness, by making it the 
source of all certainty, and is then slowly but surely 
forced by the logical working-out of his own premises 
into the attitude that Emerson describes. In 1890 he 
still thinks as in 1848 that science is our one serious 
concern ; but what a f alling-off there is in what he hopes 
even from science! He no longer claims that science 
can take the place of religion, and admits that " it pre- 
serves us from error rather than gives us the truth." * 
Towards the very end, he says in words that seem an 
echo of Emerson: "We do not know — that is all that 
can be said definitely about what is beyond the finite. 
Let us deny nothing, let us affirm nothing, let us hope." 2 
"Let us know how to wait; possibly there is nothing at 
the end ; or who can tell whether the truth is not sad ? 
Let us not be in such haste to discover it." 3 "Every- 
thing is possible, even God." 4 

1 Avenir de la science, p. xix. * Feuilles detachees, p. xvii. 

2 Feuilles detachees, p. x. 4 Ibid., 416. 



KENAN 281 

This later development of Kenan is, then, the natural 
result of the exaggerated emphasis he put from the 
outset on intellect, of his attempt to exalt the intellect 
into a position that belongs only to the character and 
will. For whatever importance we may attach to 
Knowledge, we must say to her at last in the words of 
Tennyson : — 

" Let her know her place : 
She is the second, not the first." 

Renan's cult for knowledge is in part a survival of 
the Catholic craving for an outer authority. For the 
authority of the church he substitutes the authority of 
the scientific fact. He wishes to keep the ideal, but he 
is unwilling to rest it on the bold affirmation of a prin- 
ciple in man superior to phenomenal nature, and so he 
is forced to find in the outer facts a coherency and 
orderly sequence that he is forbidden by his philosophy 
to seek in himself. In other words, his only resource 
against skepticism is a philosophy of history. 1 All the 
outer facts, the manifold happenings of the past, that 
seem so chaotic and unrelated to a skeptic like Sainte- 
Beuve, are, he would have us believe, " moving inly to 
one far-set goal " ; this goal is, of course, the triumph 
of the scientific reason. The " primitive " and instinctive 
ages have now been succeeded by an age of conscious 
reflection and analysis, and above this Renan can im- 
agine no more exalted state. He does not admit that 
beyond the spontaneity of instinct and the analytical 

1 Some of the elements of this philosophy of history are borrowed from 
Hegel, others (especially the theory of the primitive) from Herder. 



282 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

activity of the intellect there may lie the higher spon- 
taneity of the soul. He bravely accepts all the conse- 
quences of his own logic, and foresees a time when such 
forms of the " spontaneous " as art and poetry and 
even morality in the ordinary sense will have disap- 
peared, and science will be all in all. 1 At times he finds 
it hard to avoid a patronizing tone in speaking of re- 
ligion, since, after all, he is viewing this " spontaneous " 
creation from the superior platform of analysis. 

How far can the facts be made to conform to any 
such theory ? History, if studied strictly from the stand- 
point of personal righteousness and the reaction of this 
individual conduct on the common welfare, has perhaps 
a stern morality of its own. A person who studies his- 
tory in this way will not necessarily conclude with 
Renan, from the success of the English, that egotism is 
alone rewarded in the actual world, 2 nor will he see in 
the failure of the Revolution of 1848 a proof that the 
ideal is incompatible with the real. 3 But, if we are to 
judge from Renan's experience, it is not easy to have 
an intimate knowledge of the past, and then adjust this 
knowledge to any scheme for the progressive regenera- 
tion of mankind as a whole. Then, too, the facts during 
Renan's own lifetime seemed to take a perverse pleasure 
in running counter to his theories. He confesses he 
never recovered from the pessimism inspired in him by 
the events of 1851 and 1870. 4 Finally he gives over 
altogether the attempt to read the ideal into the real ; 

1 Dialogues pkil, 83 f . 2 Souvenirs, 124. 8 Ibid., 122. 

4 Ibid., 124, and Dialogues phil., p. xviii (note). 



RENAN 283 

instead of dissimulating the immorality of history, he 
exaggerates it. " Things are getting back to their nor- 
mal state," says Metius, the aristocrat, towards the end 
of the " Pretre de Nemi." " The world is going to repose 
in its natural bed, which is crime. Absurd illusion of 
these meddlesome fanatics who think it possible to get 
on without violence, to govern by reason, to treat y the 
people as a reasonable being. The world lives by suc- 
cessful crimes." 

But what could be graver than such an admission for. 
one who like Renan has no refuge from the outer fact 
— who does not found his philosophy on the validity 
of the inner sense ? Religion, the former sanction for 
the moral life, Renan has dissolved by his analysis ; the 
outer fact in which he hopes to find a new sanction fails 
him in turn, and so the moral sense is left suspended in 
the void. " Let us make up our mind to it," says M. Se- 
ailles, " the facts will not decide for us, nothing will free 
us from initiative and from responsibility for our own 
ideas. The intellectual life of Renan is an experiment 
made for the benefit of all ; it teaches us where logic 
leads a sincere mind, which, determined to follow the 
truth to the very end, looks for it in the sole testi- 
mony of facts." * If he is still virtuous, Renan tells us, 
it is because the direction given to his life by faith 
persists when faith itself has disappeared. 2 "We are 
like those animals whose brains have been taken out by 
physiologists and who continue none the less certain 
functions by sheer force of habit. But these instinctive 

1 Ernest Renan, 341. * Souvenirs, 12. 



284 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

movements will grow weaker in time. . . . We are 
living on the shadow of a shadow; what are people 
going to live on after us?" 1 Everything thus tends to 
assume in the intelligence of Renan the form of an acute 
antithesis — reason and sentiment, 2 the classic and the 
romantic, 3 the real and the ideal, 4 science and morality. 
He is unable to fuse together and reconcile these con- 
tradictory terms in the light of a higher insight. Instead 
of choosing between opposite and equally plausible con- 
clusions, he sets "the different lobes of his brain to 
dialoguing " 5 about them. Such a state, if prolonged, 
would lead to a paralysis of the will. " The dead planets 
are perhaps those in which criticism has triumphed over 
the ruses of Nature ; I sometimes fancy that, if every- 
body attained to our philosophy, the world would stop." 6 
We must not, however, take all this too literally. 
Renan still had enough faith in scientific progress to 
sustain him through years of austere labor and devo- 
tion to duty. Only this faith has ceased to be, he tells 
us, anything more than a purely personal preference. 
The facts lend themselves about as readily to the op- 
posite hypothesis. For aught we know some deception 
is being practised upon us by "God" and nature. In- 
deed, the world may be only a huge farce, the work of 
a " jovial Demiurge." 7 Nevertheless, let us remain stead- 
fast in virtue, but let us show at the same time by our 

1 Dialogues phil., p. xix ; see also Souvenirs, 343. 

2 See Souvenirs, 57 ff. (Priere sur l'Acropole). 
« Ibid. * Ibid., 122. 

6 Dialogues phil., p. viii. 6 Dialogues phil., 43 f . 

7 Drames phil., 359. 



RENAN 285 

gayety and ironical detachment that we do not take 
Nature any more seriously than she takes us. In this 
way, even if life should turn out to have no meaning, 
we shall not have been entirely mistaken. 1 Renan de- 
clares in his " Avenir de la science " that if he ever 
ceased to believe in science he would " either commit 
suicide or turn epicurean. ,, 2 His faith in science, with- 
out disappearing, had been shaken, and so, with his 
love of combining opposites, he sets out to be at one 
and the same time scientific stoic and epicurean. He 
had long recognized that the morals of Epicurus are 
alone suited to the masses. Only those partake of the 
" ideal " who advance the cause of science, — a privi- 
lege evidently reserved for an intellectual elite. To the 
common people he leaves what Wordwsorth calls " the 
primary felicities of love and wine." He is opposed to 
temperance societies that would deny the lower classes 
such legitimate satisfactions as drunkenness. He only 
asks that this drunkenness " be gentle, amiable, accom- 
panied by moral sentiments (!)." 3 

There are times when these epicurean consolations 
do not come amiss even to the scientific sage. It was 
in some such mood that Renan wrote his "Drames 
philosophiques." In reading a production like " L'Ab- 
besse de Jouarre," in which the most chastened lan- 
guage is used to express ideas that are the contrary 
of chaste, we are tempted to exclaim : Purissima im- 
puritas ! Many of these faults of taste would doubtless 

1 The foregoing argument is condensed from Feuilles de'tachees, 394 ff. 

2 Avenir de la science, 411. 8 Feuilles detachees, 384. 



286 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

have been avoided if Renan had continued to receive 
the counsel and guidance of his sister Henriette. But 
it was largely because of these very faults that he be- 
came during the closing years of his life one of the 
most popular men in France. He was often seen in 
fashionable drawing-rooms, and was in constant demand 
for public addresses, dinners, and receptions. " France/' 
as he expresses it, " likes one to flatter her and to share 
her faults." 1 

v 

We are naturally led in discussing this epicurean side 
of Renan to speak also of the " dilettanteism " with which 
his name is so often associated. Here again we have 
only to follow out the consequences of his first assump- 
tion that knowledge is an absolute and self-sufficient 
good which does not need to be made tributary to any- 
thing higher than itself. Renan sanctifies his intellect 
by putting it into the service of science, and starts out 
to be " sacredly curious of everything." 2 If he was still 
in many ways a Catholic, nothing proves more conclu- 
sively that he had ceased to be a Christian than this 
exaltation of curiosity as the highest power of our na- 
ture. 3 He himself says that "Jesus and his disciples 
had quite neglected that part of the human spirit which 
craves for knowledge." 4 The Christian tendency has 
been to run into the opposite extreme, to attach an en- 

1 Questions contemporaines, 66; see also Souvenirs, 352-53. 

2 Avenir de la science, 157. 

8 " La science restera toujours la satisfaction du plus haut de'sir de 
notre nature, la curiosite'," etc. (Avenir de la science, p. »x). 
4 L'Eglise chretienne, 142. 



KENAN 287 

tirely bad sense to the word curiosity, 1 and to see in 
all intellectual activity only a form of the libido sciendi, 
one of the three lusts by which man is assailed. We are 
told that the teachers of Port-Royal dismissed a boy 
from their school because he showed too great an intel- 
lectual eagerness. 2 Bishop Wilson, expressing the mod- 
erate Christian view, remarks, " An eager desire for 
knowledge ought to be governed and restrained, being 
as dangerous and sinful as any other inordinate appe- 
tite, even as those that are confessedly sensual." 

Kenan, for his part, can imagine no limit either to the 
pleasures or the profits of curiosity. Even paradise, he 
thinks, must be tiresome — made up in large part, as it 
is said to be, of pious old ladies — unless, indeed, it 
should be enlivened by trips of observation from planet 
to planet. 3 We cannot but sympathize with him when 
he wonders that Amiel, instead of giving himself up to 
the joys of scientific curiosity, should prefer to write a 
journal intime of sixteen thousand manuscript pages, 
filled with morbid brooding and introspection. " My 
friend, M. Berthelot, would have enough to keep him 
busy for hundreds of consecutive lives, without ever writ- 
ing about himself. I compute that I should need five 
hundred years to complete my Semitic studies, as I have 
planned them, and if my interest in them grew less, I 
should learn Chinese." 4 

1 See Pascal, Pensees, art. n, 6 : " Curiosite* n'est que vanite'," etc. Cf. 
also Tertullian, De praescr. hozr., C. 7: " Nobis curiositate opus non est 
post Jesum Christum, nee inquisitione post evangelium." 

2 See Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, m, 495. 

8 Feuilles detachees, p. xvi. 4 Ibid., 359. 



288 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Curiosity, in fact, is so satisfying that even if the serv- 
ices it is supposed to render in bringing about a scien- 
tific millenium should prove illusory, it would still be a 
sufficient reward in itself. " Whatever system we adopt 
regarding the universe and human life it cannot be de- 
nied that they appeal keenly to our curiosity. . . . We 
can abuse the world as much as we like, we shall not 
keep it from being the strangest and most absorbing of 
spectacles/' 1 etc. " Philosophical curiosity thus becomes 
the noblest and surest use of thought. Even though all 
the rest were vain, it seems that curiosity would not be 
so ; and even if it, too, were vanity, it would in any case 
have been the most delightful way of passing one's 
existence." 2 We have in such utterances the germs of 
dilettanteism. If we go back to the original Italian 
meaning, the dilettante is one who pursues a thing with- 
out any ulterior end, and solely for his own delight 
(diletto). In this particular case, the " delight " is in 
exercising curiosity for its own sake, in taking the world 
purely as a spectacle. In short, the dilettante is an in- 
tellectual voluptuary, one who uses the mind as a means 
of delicate enjoyment. The intelligence, released from 
all restraint, rejoices in its own ubiquity, and passes 
rapidly from negative to affirmative, proving that all 
points of view are plausible and that none is certain. 
Dilettanteism, as Bourget defines it, " is a disposition of 
mind at once intelligent and voluptuous, that inclines 
us towards the different forms of life, one after the other, 

1 Essais de morale et de critique, 330. 

2 Ibid., 330 f . 



RENAN 289 

and leads us to lend ourselves to all these forms without 
giving ourselves to any." ' 

We must not, however, fall into the error of the frivol- 
ous Parisian public, and see in Renan only the epicurean 
and dilettante. He retained to the end, and in the midst 
of all his uncertainties, much of his first faith in science. 
This at once puts a wide gap between him and most of 
his disciples. He still looked upon the scientist and phi- 
lologist as privileged persons, whose pursuits surpass in 
seriousness all others. M. Anatole France, on the con- 
trary, is at pains to make us feel that the occupations 
of his aged savant, M. Sylvestre Bonnard, do not differ 
in real seriousness from those of M. Trepof, the collector 
of match-boxes. Renan thinks it would be worth while 
for a thousand laborious investigators to spend their 
lives in following out the local forms of a single legend, 
that of the Wandering Jew, for example. 2 But one who 
sees in literature and erudition only refined forms of 
pleasure is logical in putting them on a level with other 
kinds of self-indulgence. " Those who read a great many 
books," says M. Anatole France, "are like eaters of 
hashish. . . . Books are the opium of the West. A day 
will come when we shall all be librarians, and that will 
be the end. . . . Fifty volumes a day are published in 
Paris alone without counting newspapers. It is a mon- 
strous orgy. We are going to come out of it mad. The 
fate of man is to fall successively into contrary excesses. 
In the Middle Ages ignorance engendered fear. There 
were mental diseases then with which we are now un- 

1 Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 59. 2 Avenir de la science, 224. 



290 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

familiar. At present we are hastening by study to 
general paralysis." * 

We need not spend much time on these disciples of 
Renan. The faith in science had diminished, even in the 
master; it is still further attenuated in the followers. 
" What is perfectly plain," says M. Anatole France, " is 
that our confidence in science, which used to be so 
strong, is more than half lost. . . . Even M. Ernest Re- 
nan, our master, who believed and hoped in science more 
than any one else, confesses that there was some illu- 
sion in thinking that modern society could be entirely 
founded on rationalism and experiment." 2 But with the 
loss of this faith in scientific progress, the last safeguard 
against skepticism tends to disappear, and the world 
resolves itself into a flux of meaningless phenomena. 
For M. France holds with Renan that philosophy, apart 
from phenomena, is only one's personal dream of the 
infinite, a mere romance of the individual sensibility. 
Man is thus deprived of all standard of certainty, either 
within or without himself. He is doomed to a hopeless 
subjectivity, and might as well give over the attempt to 
get beyond the prison walls of his own personality. 3 
Being is entirely swallowed up in becoming. These mod- 
ern adepts of the "flowing" philosophy have come to 
resemble the ancient sophist 4 who banished from his 
conversation all use of the verb to be. 

" There is no rest, no calm, no pause, 
Nor good nor ill, nor light nor shade, 

1 La Vie litteraire, i, pp. viii-ix. 2 Ibid., iv, 43. 

3 Ibid., I, p. iv. * Lycophron, a disciple of Gorgias. 



EENAN 291 

Nor essence nor eternal laws : 
For nothing is, but all is made." 

The intellect and sensibility, no longer consecrated to 
the service of science or of anything else higher than 
themselves, are put to purely epicurean uses. As a re- 
sult we had some years ago M. Maurice Barres and the 
philosophers of the " me " (moiistes), who " cultivated 
their ego ardently," and converted it into a mosaic of 
refined sensations. 1 

Renanism has thus come to be synonymous with 
some of the most subtle forms of intellectual corruption 
the world has yet known. But it would be quite un- 
profitable to dwell any longer on these dangers of dilet- 
tanteism. The failings of Renan are the very last to 
which men of our own race are liable. We can be 
counted on to avoid his over-emphasis on thinking as 
compared with doing. The natural impulse of the 
Anglo-Saxon is rather to rush into action without any 
adequate notion of what he is acting for, and then con- 
gratulate himself on leading the strenuous life. The 
very excess of Renan may serve as a corrective of what 
is correspondingly deficient in ourselves. Our ordinary 
estimate of an author needs to be thus completed by the 
standards of that ideal cosmopolitanism which Goethe 
taught and illustrated so admirably in his own life. For 
it is hardly worth while to spend so much time on for- 
eign literatures if they cannot be used to round out 
what is narrow and counteract what is inadequate in 

1 For the more recent and very different point of view of M. Barres, 
see p. 368. 



292 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

our national culture. If Renan himself was in such 
despair at the falling-out between France and Germany, 
it was because he believed that French thought and 
German thought cannot work to advantage separately, 
that one is needed to correct the other. 1 The intellect- 
ual sensitiveness and critical finesse, the delight in the 
free play of ideas, and the large hospitality of mind 
that characterize men like Renan and Sainte-Beuve, are 
not qualities that from present appearances we run any 
risk of overdeveloping. It would hardly be going too 
far to say of Renan and Sainte-Beuve, quite apart from 
the question of their absolute rank, that they are, of 
all French writers of the nineteenth century, the ones 
likely to prove of most value to English and American 
readers. 

VI 

There is one more way in which Renan may become 
our teacher. Any study of him would be singularly in- 
complete that failed to do justice to his greatness as an 
artist. He owes his preeminent place in recent literature 
even less, perhaps, to his importance as a thinker than 
to the perfection of his literary workmanship — to a 
finish of form that is rare in French prose, and still 
rarer in English. " More than any other writer of the 
century," says M. Faguet, " he has charm, the inde- 
finable something that envelops and finally takes posses- 
sion of us. Certain pages of the ' Souvenirs d'enfance ' 
— for example, the 'Prayer on the Acropolis' — are 
among the finest that have been written in French." 2 

1 See La Reforme int. et mor., 124. 

2 Histoire de la litterature franqaise, n, 401. 



KENAN 293 

The high quality of this charm is attested by the very 
fact that it eludes all analysis. The highest art should 
be thus free from any trick or 'mannerism that can be 
caught or imitated. As Joubert remarks : " We do not 
like in the arts to see whence our impressions arise. 
The Naiad should hide her urn ; the Nile should conceal 
his sources." 

In short, Renan has accomplished the rare feat of 
having a style without being a stylist. He tells us that 
he was "always the least literary of men." 1 This utter- 
ance has in it something of the unjust disdain of the 
philologist for the man of imagination, but it is intended 
even more as a protest against the too deliberate strain- 
ing after literary effect that Renan found in so many of 
his contemporaries. He cannot conceal his impatience 
at those who are men of letters before being men, at 
the aesthete who busies himself with the means of ex- 
pression before making sure that he has anything to 
express. When asked by a reporter of the " Figaro " for 
his opinion of the Symbolists and other literary schools 
that were making such a stir at Paris a few years ago, 
he replied : Ce sont des enfants qui se sucent lepouce. 2 

Renan, in fact, was inclined to see in this too con- 
sciously literary attitude towards life, the great malady 
of his time: "Morbus litter arius f The distinctive 
feature of this disease is that we love things not so 
much for themselves as for the literary effect they pro- 
duce. We come to see the world through a sort of 

1 Souvenirs, 354. 

3 Huret, Enquete sur revolution litteraire, 422. 



294 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

theatrical illusion. . . . The glare of the footlights 
spoils us for the light of day." * Literature seemed to 
him to have been invaded by that instinct for posing 
and stage effect to which, in its lower forms, the French 
give the name of cdbotinage. It would not be easy to 
exaggerate this element in French character, especially 
since Rousseau and the romanticists. Natio comceda 
est Some one said of Chateaubriand that he would like 
to occupy a hermit's cell — on a stage. Of late things 
in France have come to such a pass that duels are 
fought in the presence of press representatives and 
amateur photographers. The strange maladies that 
Renan saw flourishing around him under the name of 
art and literature furnished him many hints for the 
picture he has drawn in his " Antechrist " of Nero — 
the imperial cabotin — and Roman society of the deca- 
dence. Nero, he tells us, was a " conscientious romanti- 
cist," the first to discover that art and literature are the 
only things in life to be taken seriously, and therefore 
an authentic ancestor of the school of V art pour Vart. 
Renan, in his anxiety to avoid these errors of sestheti- 
cism, 2 was even ready to proscribe all systematic teaching 
of rhetoric and composition as tending to instil into the 
young the dangerous heresy that expression has a value 
independent of what is expressed. 3 He early discovered, 

1 Feuilles detachees, 232. 

2 We should recollect that Renan avoids these errors in the form and 
not in the substance of his writings. Reference has already been made to 
his moral aestheticism. Cf. also passages like Souvenirs, 115, where he 
asserts that beauty is to be preferred to virtue. 

3 Souvenirs, 253 f . ; see also 220. 



RENAN 295 

he says, that "romanticism of form is an error/' 1 and so 
he remained faithful to the classic tradition of French 
prose, to that ancient school of literary good breeding 
which saw in a quiet and unobtrusive style a virtue akin 
to quietness and unobtrusivenessof dress. There is a strict 
analogy between the legendary red waistcoat of Theo- 
phile Gautier and Gautier's style. Renan was so apprehen- 
sive of falling into these excesses of the picturesque that 
he spent a whole year, as he informs us, in " toning down " 
the style of the " Vie de Jesus." 2 This respect for the 
traditional standards of French prose in the very midst 
of the romantic revolt, he owed in part to his own native 
good taste, and still more, perhaps, to the influence of 
his sister Henriette. "She it was who convinced me 
that it is possible to say everything in the simple and 
correct style of the classic authors and that new expres- 
sions and violent images always come either from pre- 
tentiousness or ignorance of our real riches." 3 " Ah! do 
not say," he adds elsewhere, "that they achieved no- 
thing, those obscure wits of the seventeenth century, 
whose lives were spent in passing judgment upon words 
and weighing syllables. They achieved a masterpiece 
— the French language. They rendered an inappreciable 
service to the human spirit by creating the Dictionary, 
by preserving us from that undefined liberty which is 
fatal to languages. ... A man has really attained to 
his full maturity of mind only when he has come to see 

1 Souvenirs, 89. 2 Ibid., 355. 

8 Ma Sceur Henriette, 35 f. Other persons who exercised a happy influ- 
ence on Kenan's style were Augustin Thierry (see Souvenirs, 371), and M. 
de Sacy of the Journal des Debate (see Feuilles detachees, 135). 



296 MODEKN FRENCH CRITICISM 

that the Dictionary of the Academy contains all that is 
needed for the expression of every thought, however 
delicate or novel or refined it may be." * To grasp the 
full significance of the conservative, and even timid, 
attitude that Renan here assumes towards his native 
tongue, we have only to contrast it with the attitude 
of a literary sans-culotte like Victor Hugo, who boasts 
that he has dealt like a Robespierre with the French 
vocabulary and "put a red liberty cap on the old Dic- 
tionary." 

In spite of the precept and example of Hugo and 
most of the men of letters of his time, Renan persisted 
to the end in thinking that sobriety and restraint and 
regard for traditional good taste are literary virtues. 
As a result, his style is so uniformly perfect that it 
rarely if ever falls short, save in so far as it images the 
shortcomings of his character and philosophy. The 
masculine elements do not predominate in his character, 
and his style is therefore without the virile ring that 
we find in the prose of a Pascal. There is not enough 
in his philosophy to exalt him above himself, so that his 
pages do not often have the communicative warmth 
that can come only from a vital conviction. If, instead 
of trying his work by these severe standards, we com- 
pare it with other recent achievement in France or 
elsewhere, we can hardly fail to recognize its rare dis- 
tinction. Our total judgment of Renan may be summed 
up by saying that, though he is a great intelligence, he 
has few of the qualities of a great philosopher, but 
1 Essais de morale et de critique, 341 f . . 



RENAN 297 

many of the qualities of a great historian, and nearly 
all the qualities of a great artist. He is a consummate 
master of prose style in a language that easily surpasses 
in the general excellence of its prose all other modern 
literatures. 



X 

BRUNETIERE 

Few men have ever crowded more intense activity 
into a life of fifty-seven years than Brunetiere and there 
are few more striking examples of what may be achieved 
by a frail physique when sustained by an indomitable 
will. After having in his youth been refused admission 
as a student to the Ecole Normale, he finally entered 
as a teacher into that inner citadel of French higher 
education. He became member of the Academy in 1893, 
and almost at the same time, after long service in a sub- 
altern post, editor-in-chief of the "Revue des Deux 
Mondes." His trip to America early in 1897 was only 
one of his many appearances as orator and lecturer. 
He published on an average at least a volume a year 
during the thirty years or more of his activity as a 
critic, yet died before finishing the History of French 
Classicism which promised to be his monument: Pendent 
opera interrupta. The completed portions of this work 
are suggestive of a greater mellowness, or at least of 
some toning-down of the logical asperity of his style. 
The study of Montaigne, which is one of the last things 
he did, is also one of the best, a remarkable achieve- 
ment for a man in the final stages of a wasting disease. 
Montaigne, a notable embodiment of the esprit de 
finesse, has rarely if ever been better judged than by 



BRUNETI^RE 299 

Brunetiere, an embodiment of the esprit de geometrie ; 
for one can scarcely admit, as M. de Vogue contends in 
his commemorative article in the " Revue des Deux 
Mondes," that there was a perfect balance in Brunetiere's 
mind between the two elements defined by Pascal. His 
real kinship in the sixteenth century is not with Mon- 
taigne, but with that master logician, John Calvin. 
There is the same lack of delicacy, amenity, charm ; but 
one should add of Brunetiere's style, as he himself says 
of Calvin's, that " its severity has after all its own no- 
bility, and its very angularity and tension its own 
special majesty. 



» i 



Calvin is the first eminent example of the esprit de 
geometrie in French prose, but the same turn for dia- 
lectic is visible in the earlier scholastics who wrote in 
Latin. Like Taine, Brunetiere makes us feel how much 
scholasticism still lingers in the land of its origin. 
Though both tried to apply the methods of inductive 
science, they remained scholastic in their passion for 
vast structures of general ideas conceived with geo- 
metric symmetry and with reference less to the observed 
facts than to a logical requirement of the mind ; they 
are scholastic by their use, as well as by their abuse, of 
dialectic, by their proneness to mistake ratiocination 
for reason. This passion for logical consistency has 
been from the start the chief merit of the French mind, 
or, when indulged in at the expense of the facts and 
common sense, its most serious failing. The French 

1 Hist, de la lit.fr. classique, V Partie, 218. 



300 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

readiness on occasion to oppose ratiocination to plain 
evidence reminds one of M. Jourdain and the skill in 
fence that enabled him to kill a man par raison demon- 
strative. Perhaps the most irritating example in the 
case of Brunetiere is the attitude he assumed during 
the Dreyfus affair. Yet in a general way Brunetiere's 
logic shows more respect for the facts than Taine's. 
Facts that enter Taine's mind are like rays of light 
passing through a bit of Iceland spar, — they are re- 
fracted and polarized along the lines of his theory. 
There is less real science in Brunetiere than in Taine 
and also less pseudo-science, or at least the pseudo- 
science is less intimately interwoven with his treatment 
of literature ; it does not, like Taine's determinism, im- 
pose upon him a method that is not only unliterary but 
positively anti-literary. In spite of his attempt at lit- 
erary Darwinism, to be noted later, Brunetiere is not a 
scientist, but a logician with a brilliant oratorical gift 
and a keen sense of historical development. 

The sense of historical development is the main 
point of contact between Brunetiere and Sainte-Beuve, 
and this point of contact only emphasizes their differ- 
ences. Sainte-Beuve, who was supremely endowed, as 
I have said, with the esprit de finesse, had almost as 
great a passion for the particular as Brunetiere had for 
the general. He aims, as he puts it, to particularize 
everything, and when he generalizes it would seem that 
he does so only under protest. No man was ever more 
on his guard against the deceit that lurks in universale, 
Yet if, in Emerson's phrase, "nature resents general- 



BRUNETIERE 301 

izing," what is highest in human nature resents the lack 
of it. We are justified in demanding a compromise 
between the multiplicity of the facts and the craving 
for unity. The epigraph of Brunetiere's "Evolution 
de la poesie lyrique" was evidently directed against 
the method of Sainte-Beuve : " Whenever we are trying 
to get at the meaning of a complex phenomenon, it is 
useless if not dangerous to go too minutely into details." 
The volume on Balzac written by Brunetiere shortly be- 
fore his death is almost bare of details about Balzac's 
life ; this too is a protest against the tendency of the 
modern school to substitute biographical small-talk for 
the serious business of criticism. 

Brunetiere is admirable as an historian of ideas when 
his logic is tempered by a sufficient knowledge of the 
facts, as is the case for nearly the whole of French 
literature from the latter part of the sixteenth century 1 
to the present day. Throughout this whole field his eru- 
dition is immense and is aided by a marvellous memory. 
He is at his best in tracing main currents of ideas — in 
such articles, for example, as the one on the " Forma- 
tion of the Idea of Progress." This is a kind of writ- 
ing which is thoroughly worth while in itself, and of 
which we have only too little in English. Brunetiere, 
however, knew virtually nothing at first hand about 
Greek, very little about the Middle Ages, and not 
enough of other modern literatures besides French. He 

1 For Brunetiere's imperfect knowledge of the early sixteenth century 
in France, especially in its relations to Italy, see article by M. Henri 
Hauvette, in Revue critique (8 juillet, 1905, 14 ff). 



302 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

is capable of saying that Lessing 1 wished to rid Ger- 
many of Greek and Latin, that Burns and Shelley 2 
were at the opposite extreme of the social scale from 
Byron, and that Plato " argues like a sophist and 
thinks like a child." 3 We may suspect that a man who 
pronounces suoh a judgment on Plato is not a trust- 
worthy witness to some of the higher things of the 
imagination. For the critic who is himself unimagina- 
tive lacks the " fit key," as Chapman expresses it, " with 
poesy to open poesy." Brunetiere lived for neither the 
senses nor the imagination, but solely for ideas. One 
might say of him, reversing Gautier's familiar remark, 
that he was a man for whom the visible world did not 
exist. " He was possibly," says M. de Vogue, " the 
only great man of letters of the nineteenth century for 
whom Rousseau had never lived, nor Rousseau's eldest 
son, Chateaubriand, and who did not have in his blood 
a single drop of their delicious poisons." We may ad- 
mit the truth of this assertion, if not for Brunetiere's 
temperament, at least for his style. He is in curious 
contrast in this respect to Taine, who had according to 
M. Lemaitre, a " violent and carnal imagination," and 
who at any rate indulges in almost a superabundance 
of picturesque details. 

If Taine mixes his logic with local color, Brunetiere's 
logic is militant and oratorical. The title of some of his 
last volumes, " Discours de Combat," would be equally 
appropriate for his collected works. He is fond of say- 
ing of the great French writers of the seventeenth 

1 Etudes critiques, vi, 225. 2 Ibid., 234. 8 Discours de combat, 90. 



BRUNETIERE 303 

century that they had a " spoken style " — that they 
did not " see themselves write/' but " heard themselves 
talk." This remark holds good of his own style, which 
always has the movement of the spoken word without 
having anything of the ease of conversation. The argu- 
ments are clamped and mortised together by logical 
connectives, and pushed forward in menacing array, in 
a manner that suggests the advance of Roman legion- 
aries with interlocked shields. He has been called the 
inventor of militant criticism. He reminds one of the 
old saying about the father of logic : Quaerit Aris- 
toteles pugnam. " A man would not feel himself alive," 
Brunetiere remarks in the course of a plea for Christ- 
tianity (!), " if he did not have adversaries." 1 In default 
of a real adversary he frequently addresses himself to 
an imaginary one. His rude and imperious temper has 
been likened to the testiness of the neo-classical Aris- 
tarch, a Boileau or a Dr. Johnson . But, unlike Brunetiere, 
these men had an underlying geniality that saved them, 
even when most severe, from seeming atrabilious. 

Sainte-Beuve, as we have seen, said of modern critics 
that they abounded in all the critical virtues except the 
essential virtues of authority and judgment ; that what 
they had gained in brilliancy and versatility they often 
seemed to have lost in weight and impressiveness. It is 
the distinction of Brunetiere to have avoided the re- 
proach of Sainte-Beuve and to have given back to the 
word "critic" something of its former meaning. He had 
convictions and insisted on judging with reference to 
1 Discours de combat, 2 e s^rie, 166. 



304 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

them at a time when convictions, at least among the 
educated classes, had almost completely gone out of 
fashion. He possessed something of the power that 
usually belongs to those who have convictions to im- 
pose themselves on those who have none. He persisted 
in the somewhat antiquated notion that books exist 
primarily to express ideas, whereas most people now- 
adays turn to books, not for ideas, but for entertain- 
ment or at best for elegant aesthetic sensation. He 
made himself the champion of the classical tradition 
and proclaimed the supremacy of reason at an epoch 
when art was given over to every form of morbid sub- 
jectivity. He was stern and ascetic in a period of easy- 
going self-indulgence. He produced work marked by 
eminently masculine qualities at a time when literature 
had fallen to a great extent under the influence of 
women. He restricted his style so far as possible to the 
syntax and vocabulary of Bossuet in an age that saw the 
publication of the sonnets of Mallarme and the Journal 
of the Goncourts. 

Renan urges us not to get ruffled, but " to suffer the 
destinies of the planet to be fulfilled ; our outcries will 
be of no use, our ill-humor would be quite out of place." 1 
This comfortable philosophy is the exact opposite of 
Brunetiere's. He liked to quote Comte's saying that hu- 
manity is composed of more dead than living. He so 
championed the opinions of this dead majority as to 
come into conflict with nearly all the main tendencies 
of his own age. A modern Siger of Brabant, he took it 

1 Souvenirs t p. xx. 



BRUNETIERE 305 

upon himself to syllogize truths unpalatable to most 
of his countrymen. He defended the general sense 
of mankind in such a way as to isolate himself from 
his contemporaries. " It is a sort of joy," he remarks, 
" for a man to stand apart in the midst of an indiffer- 
ent or hostile society, living in it and belonging to it, 
but judging it." Of this austere joy Brunetiere must 
have had his fill, especially if, as his friends claim, 
he was very far from being steeled to the inevitable 
reprisals. Possibly his sympathy for Alfred de Vigny 
was due, not only to a common pessimism, but to the 
fact that, like Vigny, he concealed a great sensitiveness 
under outer coldness and reserve. A stoic, born into a 
somewhat neurasthenic age, Brunetiere looked on it as 
his special mission to attack every form of epicurean 
relaxation. There was, then, an almost necessary con- 
flict between him, the least Gallic of Frenchmen, and 
contemporaries whom he describes as "epicureans of 
the decadence " ; between himself and M. France, whom 
he deemed to be no better than a literary voluptuary ; 
between himself and Renan, who seemed to him bent 
on turning the intellect itself into a means of refined 
enjoyment. 

The history of Brunetiere's work as a critic is, to a 
great extent, the history of his polemics. Three of 
these polemics in particular deserve attention. At the 
very beginning of his career as a writer in the " Revue 
des Deux Mondes" he singled out Zola and the natural- 
ists for his attacks, and continued these attacks in a 
running fire of articles extending over a period of 



306 MODERN FEENCH CRITICISM 

twelve years. Later on, he proclaimed that modern sci- 
ence was bankrupt, 1 that it had failed to keep its prom- 
ises, and he thus became involved in a war of pamphlets 
with Berthelot and other advocates of purely experi- 
mental methods. And finally, for a number of years he 
never lost an opportunity to assail M. Jules Lemaitre 
and M. Anatole France and the partisans of impression- 
istic criticism. 

ii 

The volume in which Brunetiere collected the earlier 
articles of his first critical campaign (" Le Roman na- 
turaliste," 1883) was the first weighty protest against 
the naturalistic doctrine that had held unquestioned 
sway since " Madame Bovary " and Taine's essay on 
Balzac. He took special pains to demolish the scientific 
pretensions of Zola and his followers, especially the cult 
of the " human document." The collection of notes and 
minute observations of the passing show of life, he says, 
renewing a favorite distinction of Goethe's, can at most 
give the actual, but not the real, which it is the aim of 
art to render. Applied to the past the method is equally 
futile. Edmond de Goncourt had not succeeded in dis- 
engaging a true history from the "thirty thousand 
pamphlets and two thousand newspapers" 2 that ac- 
cording to his own statement he had read in prepara- 
tion for his book on the eighteenth century. Stripped 

1 The phrase " faillite de la science " occurs in the article in the Revue 
des Deux Mondes (1 Janvier, 1895), written after his return from the 
Vatican. M. Berthelot replied in the Revue de Paris (1 fevrier, 1895). 

2 Le Roman naturaliste, 296. 



BRUNETIERE 307 

of its veneer of pseudo-science, its piling up of notes of 
life literally observed, naturalism, so far from being a 
reaction against romanticism, is in many respects its log- 
ical continuation. The temperament of Zola reproduces 
on a lower plane the temperament of Hugo ; the roman- 
tic dream has merely changed into a nightmare. " M. Zola 
reconstructs nature and adjusts it to the exigencies of 
his own hallucinations," 1 says Brunetiere. He substi- 
tutes audaciously for reality " the obscene or grotesque 
visions of his overheated imagination." 2 Brunetiere 
points out the relationship between Flaubert and Cha- 
teaubriand. The "impressionism" of the Goncourts, 
which he defines as a systematic confusion of the art 
of painting with the art of writing, 3 is also plainly of 
romantic origin. 

Naturalism, indeed, is already in germ in the " Con- 
fessions " of Rousseau ; and so Brunetiere was consistent 
in taking a distinctly hostile attitude towards the whole 
literature which issued from Rousseau. He was one of the 
first to point out what he called the essentially " lyrical" 
character of the great romantic writers : and by this he 
meant their complete self -absorption, their unwillingness 
to occupy themselves with anything except their own 
emotions, their imperviousness to ideas. At the distance 
of nearly a century, the attempt of Chateaubriand to 
stem the current of modern thought, and to react in the 
name of religion towards the Middle Ages, is seen to 
have resulted, not in the maintenance of a Christian 
ideal in literature, but in the isolation of literature from 
1 Le Roman naturaliste, 350. 2 Ibid., 348. 8 Ibid., 94. 



308 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

life. It had been the ambition of Andre Chenier to 
effect a reconciliation between the artistic imagination 
and modern science, but the writers who followed the 
lead of Chateaubriand took a certain pride in remaining 
ignorant of the intellectual and scientific aspirations of 
their age. The penalty they paid was an increasing in- 
capacity for ideas. Chateaubriand himself was concerned 
more with the images and the musical cadences of his 
periods than with their intellectual content. Resolutely 
silencing in himself any velleity he may have had to 
think, and bidding defiance to the bourgeois, Gautier 
gave himself up exclusively to the search for rare and 
refined aesthetic sensation. As time went on the means 
employed by the different schools to arrive at a titillation 
of the aesthetic faculty became increasingly complex and 
incomprehensible to the uninitiated. "Literature," wrote 
M. Lemaitre at the height of the symbolistic movement, 
" tends more and more to become a mysterious diversion 
of mandarins." 

If such was the fate of a literature devoid of intel- 
lectual qualities, science, bereft of the succor of the 
imagination, fell only too often into arid analysis. In 
spite of their apparent divergence, however, the two 
classes, the aesthetes and the analysts, had one import- 
ant point of resemblance. The artist pursued his aesthe- 
tic sensation and the scientist his analysis mechanically 
and as ends in themselves without reference to any aim 
that would have brought them into contact with life 
as a whole. They wanted respectively art for art's sake 
and science for the sake of science. They refused equally 



BRUNETIERE 309 

to take cognizance of that region of their own nature 
which is independent of both sensation and analysis, 
and thus cut themselves off from the insight which alone 
makes possible a belief in the freedom of the will. In 
this way it came to pass that Zola, one of the extreme 
representatives of a literature of pure sensation, was 
able to agree with Taine, an extreme scientific intellect- 
ualist, in the affirmation that virtue and vice are pro- 
ducts no less than sugar and vitriol. " A whole subtle 
psychology utterly escapes him," says Brunetiere of 
Zola, " the psychology of the forces of intellect and will 
which carry on the good fight against the shock of sen- 
sation and resist the assaults of desire. Do not speak 
to him of a liberty which is in some sort detached from 
the body, dominating it and imposing on it higher ends 
than the satisfaction of bodily cravings ; he would not 
understand you." * 

Brunetiere thus attacked the aesthetic naturalists 
because of their disregard of those qualities which are 
most truly human, because of their attempt to reduce 
man to the plane of animal instinct. In defense likewise 
of the human self and of the discipline it imposes he 
attacked the " impudent knowingness " of the scientific 
naturalists, of a Berthelot, for example, who proclaimed 
that the answer to every question is to be sought in the 
laboratory and that there are "no more mysteries." 
Man, Brunetiere insists, is more than nature. " The 
great error of the century, in morality as well as in 
science and art, has been to mingle and confound man 

1 Le Roman naturaliste, 207. 



310 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

with nature without pausing to consider that in art as 
in science and morality he is a man only in so far as he 
distinguishes himself from nature and makes himself an 
exception in it." 1 One of the most pernicious doctrines 
of Rousseau is also one of the most widely spread — 
that of the natural goodness of man. 2 Man becomes 
good in reality not by obeying but by resisting " na- 
ture." 

Brunetiere' s work, then, in one of its main aspects 
may be defined as a reaction against nineteenth-century 
naturalism ; a protest against the absorption of man into 
nature. " There is surely," says Sir Thomas Browne, 
" a piece of divinity in us ; something that was before 
the elements and owes no homage unto the Sun." 
Brunetiere differs from Sir Thomas Browne in that he 
seems to have arrived at the notion of this supersensuous 
self more by logic than by direct vision. His idealism, 
resting: as it does on ratiocination rather than on in- 
sight, remains essentially negative, and so failed to bring 
consolation. 

Brunetiere was fond of speaking of Christianity and 
Buddhism as the great pessimistic religions, and of 
identifying their doctrines with those of Schopenhauer. 
In one of his essays, indeed, he seems to put the system 
of Schopenhauer above Christianity and Buddhism. He 
failed, on the one hand, to feel the essentially negative 
character of the philosophy of Schopenhauer ; and on 
the other hand, to appreciate that positive principle of 
joy and illumination which is the saving element of 

1 Nouvettes questions de critique, 343. 2 Ibid., 345, 370. 



BRUNETI^RE 311 

both Christianity and Buddhism. " Let us live happily, 
then, though we call nothing our own ; for so shall we 
be like to the bright gods feeding on happiness." 1 There 
is something in the ring of this passage which will 
serve once for all to mark the difference between the 
temper of Buddhism and the acrid disillusion of Scho- 
penhauer; and what is true of Buddhism is at least 
equally true of Christianity. 

ill 

Before considering, however, more fully Brunetiere's 
relation to religion let us take up his third and most 
important polemic — that with the advocates of im- 
pressionistic criticism. Here again he championed the 
ideal as he understood it. He maintained against M. 
Lemaitre and M. France that in addition to an apparent 
self of sensations and impressions there exists in each 
man a real self that he possesses in common with other 
men. He threw himself with special ardor into a con- 
flict that seemed to him to be pro aris et focis and 
to involve the very life of criticism. The cultivation of 
literary criticism for several centuries in France has 
had the somewhat paradoxical result of producing critics 
who deny its very possibility. "As for myself/' says 
M. France in the preface to the fourth volume of his 
critical studies, " I am not in the least a critic. I have 
no talent for working the threshing-machines into 
which ingenious persons put the literary harvest in 
order to separate the grain from the chaff." His utmost 

1 Dhammapada. 



312 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

endeavor, he adds elsewhere, is to tell pleasantly of the 
" adventures " of his soul in the midst of masterpieces. 1 
M. France, it may be noted in passing, is fond of talk- 
ing of his " soul," when he means in reality his nerves 
and sensibility. M. Lemaitre and M. France are both 
desfeminins. To the personality of M. France in par- 
ticular there attaches something of that elusive charm 
which makes its possessor a baffling problem to others, 
and very often to himself. The debate between him 
and Brunetiere took on at times the aspect of a warfare 
between the masculine and feminine principles. Strength 
was pitted against charm, and reason arrayed against 
sensibility. 

A philosophical point of view always reflects in some 
measure the temperament of its propounder. The im- 
pressionists assert that it can reflect nothing else. 
Unfortunately M. Lemaitre and M. France justified their 
assertion too much by their practice and Brunetiere 
did not disprove it sufficiently by his. In the case of 
all three men we have the feeling of temperamental 
qualities that are quarrelling with one another simply 
because they are not, as Goethe says of his Tasso and 
Antonio, united in one person. But even such a union 
of qualities would not give all that is needful for the 
best criticism. There would still be lacking the type of 
intuition that Joubert possessed more completely per- 
haps than any other modern French critic. 

M. Lemaitre and M. France have, as a matter of 
fact, worked rather far apart since the polemic with 
1 La Vie litteraire, z, p. iii. 



BRUNETIERE 313 

Brunetiere in the early nineties, and even at the time 
they were perhaps not so close together as Brunetiere 
supposed. They both, indeed, have a greater degree of 
aesthetic perceptiveness than Brunetiere, of that gusto, 
as we may say, which is the necessary basis, though not 
the whole, of taste. M. Lemaitre is not only superior to 
Brunetiere in gusto, but at the time of his polemic with 
him displayed a special gusto for that contemporary 
literature from which Brunetiere drew back with almost 
ascetic distrust. M. Lemaitre says that such is his love 
for the literature of the second half of the nineteenth 
century — " so intelligent, so restless, so mad, so mo- 
rose, so morbid, so subtle " — that at times it makes 
him "quiver with delight and penetrates him with 
pleasure to his very marrow." * 

In his literary sensitiveness M. Lemaitre reminds 
one of Sainte-Beuve and has written pages that Sainte- 
Beuve would probably have been more willing to sign 
than those of any other recent French critic. Anima- 
tion, sprightliness, sparkling wit, and at the same time 
the power to insinuate deep and penetrating reflection 
under cover of an airy irresponsibility — these and 
other literary virtues abound in M. Lemaitre. Yet the 
total impression that disengages itself from the work of 
what one may term his first period is a sort of spiritual 
bewilderment. He evidently finds no counterpoise in 
himself to an infinitely mobile intellect and sensibility. 
He reminds one of the Jesuit father in Pascal who 
would undertake to make any point of view look " prob- 

1 Contemporains, i, 239. 



314 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

able/' " It is delightful to see this learned casuist enter 
into the pros and cons of the same question and dis- 
cover good reasons everywhere — such is his subtlety 
and ingenuity." M. Lemaitre is ready to argue a ques- 
tion from two, four or six points of view, avoiding the 
odd number as savoring too much of a conclusion. 

Yet we must be careful not to exaggerate the spiritual 
bewilderment and lack of standards of M. Lemaitre, 
even when he was most impressionistic. He may have 
quivered responsive in his inmost fibres to the appeal 
of the ultra-modern, but ultra-modern writers like Zola 
and Huysmans and Verlaine had no special reason to be 
elated by his verdicts on them. He reacts upon writers 
of this kind in a way to show that he has not merely 
gusto but taste. In lieu of the logic that so superabounds 
in Brunetiere he has instinctive good sense, which is an 
extremely classical virtue. " No, I shall not speak of 
them," he says of the verses of the symbolists, " because 
I find them unintelligible and that bores me. It is n't 
my fault. A simple native of Touraine, child of a sen- 
sible, moderate and mocking race, with the stamp upon 
me of twenty years of classic habits, I am ill prepared 
to understand their gospel." * 

M. Lemaitre, in short, had from the beginning a hold 
on literary tradition that balanced the keenness of his 
relish for contemporaries ; and though he lacked inner 
standards he plainly suffered from the lack and did not 
delight, like M. France, in mere mocking detachment. 
The attack on Renan that first attracted attention to 

1 Contemporains, iv, 66. 



BRUNETIERE 315 

M. Lemaitre as a critic, though it doubtless seemed 
somewhat naive to him later, and though he himself 
abounds in irony, and above all in true Gallic malice and 
irreverence, is yet significant. " This man," he imagines 
a somewhat rhetorical opponent saying of Renan, " passed 
through the most terrible moral crisis that a soul can 
traverse. He was forced at the age of twenty, and under 
conditions which made the choice especially painful and 
dramatic, to choose between faith and science, . . . and 
he is gay. For a rent that was more superficial (for per- 
haps he was only a rhetorician) Lamennais died in final 
despair ; for a great deal less than that Jouffroy remained 
incurably sad. For still less, for merely having feared 
that he might doubt, Pascal went mad, 1 and M. Renan 
is gay ! No, no ; M. Renan has not the right to be gay ; 
he can be so only by the most audacious of inconsist- 
encies. Even as Macbeth murdered sleep, so M. Renan 
twenty times, a hundred times over in every one of his 
books, has murdered joy, has murdered action, has 
murdered spiritual peace and the tranquillity of the 
moral life." 2 It is therefore not surprising that under 
the stress of the Dreyfus affair M. Lemaitre should, in 
lieu of the inner standards he lacked, have fallen back on 
traditional standards ; in other words, should have allied 
himself, though in a less degree than Brunetiere, with 
the reactionaries. Yet the gap between the Lemaitre of 
to-day and the Lemaitre whom Brunetiere attacked as 
an impressionist is not so wide as one might suppose. 

1 This conception of Pascal is now discredited. 

2 Contemporains, I, 203. 



316 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

In his book on Racine he defends the classical point of 
view with a sort of impressionistic trepidation. The 
result is piquant and in some respects delectable. In the 
"Rousseau/* we have an impressionist attacking the 
father of impressionism, and this too is not without 
piquancy. But here we are more sensible to the defects 
than to the virtues of the method, especially to the lack 
of that large intellectual structure for which no amount 
of cleverness in single pages can atone. The sense of a 
contraction of horizon that one nearly always has in 
French reactionaries is reinforced in this case by M. 
Lemaitre' s insufficient knowledge of Rousseau's total in- 
fluence abroad as well as in France. It will be noted also 
that during his reactionary period M. Lemaitre has 
been drawn, whether in attack or defense, to writers, who, 
like himself, have a highly developed if not predomin- 
ant sensibility, — Racine, Fenelon, Rousseau, Chateau- 
briand. He still believes that the critic is governed by 
his own changing sensibility and that criticism is there- 
fore a " chimera." 1 

IV 

M. France began by denying the possibility of fixed 
standards far more radically than M. Lemaitre and has 
persisted in his denial. One finds in him the culmina- 
tion and extreme expression of a main form of the crit- 
ical spirit which he identifies with criticism itself — the 
form which, as he says, had for its creators Montaigne, 
Saint-Evremond and Bayle ; the last in date of all the 
literary forms and destined perhaps to absorb all the 

1 Chateaubriand, 223. 



BRUNETIERE 317 

others. In our day of absolute intellectual liberty, when 
curiosity is the chief virtue, this form has taken the 
place of theology and has found its Saint Thomas 
Aquinas in Sainte-Beuve. 1 

M. France as a matter of fact has simply developed to 
the ultimate stage the germs of relativity in his masters 
Sainte-Beuve and Renan. The substitution of the notion 
of the relative for the notion of the absolute — this, 
indeed, seems to have been the characteristic achieve- 
ment of the nineteenth century not only in literary 
criticism, but in all departments of thought. From 
Hegel to Darwin, the idea of " becoming," of growth 
and development, has, in a hundred forms, so pene- 
trated and transformed the mental habits of the modern 
man as to make it increasingly difficult for him to look 
upon anything as fixed and final. " The absolute is 
dead ! " exclaimed Edmond Scherer in 1860. But the 
heart, as we have seen, refused to ratify this verdict of 
the head. Renan's attempt to reconcile in himself the 
old man with the new resulted in his theory of a God 
who does not yet exist, but is in process of " becom- 
ing." It was left for M. Anatole France to rid himself 
of these weak scruples, and to arrive at what may be 
termed the doctrine of the absolutely relative. The affirm- 
ation of M. France that he is absolutely imprisoned in 
his own personality, that there is no standard to which 
he may refer either his own opinions or those of others, 
has as its corollary a doctrine of universal illusion. The 
immense indulgence he professes comes in part, indeed, 

1 La Vie lit., i, p. v. 



318 MODEEN FRENCH CRITICISM 

from his power of sympathy, but even more from a tran- 
quil contempt for human nature thus looked upon as the 
mere puppet of illusion. Health and disease are vain en- 
tities ; J so are sanity and madness. 2 The new sect of 
"flowing " philosophers to which M. France belongs has 
arrived at a conception of life closely corresponding to 
that of the " flowing " philosophers of old : — 

" All thoughts, all creeds, all dreams are true, 
All visions wild and strange ; 
Man is the measure of all truth 

Unto himself. All truth is change." 

The Oriental doctrine of illusion has thus appeared 
in Western thought, but not accompanied, as it was in 
the mind of the Hindu, by a vision of the One. Leconte 
de Lisle, who is the poet of this modern doctrine of 
illusion, excels in seizing and rendering with extraordin- 
ary intensity the most fugitive appearances of space 
and time, and all without the slightest sentiment of a 
spiritual reality either in man or behind the shows of 
nature. There has passed into his verse something of 
the horror and vertigo that come from thus contemplat- 
ing the meaningless flow of phenomena as they start up 
from vacancy, stand out for a moment on a background 
of deepest black, and then vanish into the void : — 

" Eclair, reve sinistre, e'ternite' qui ment, 
La Vie antique est faite ine'puisablement 
Du tour billon sans fin des apparences vaines." 

The sense of universal illusion does not result, in the 
case of M. France, so much in metaphysical anguish 
i La Vie lit, u, p. viii, a Ibid., 1, 183. 



BRUNETI^RE 319 

as in an extreme form of the romantic irony that 
abounds in the later work of Renan — the irony of the 
man who hovers over all points of view and refuses to 
be bound by any because every point of view is neces- 
sarily relative and transitory. M. France, however, could 
cease from his detachment and become militant enough 
when, as in the Dreyfus affair, the liberties of the ironist 
seemed to be threatened by a reversion to the past 
and its intolerant attempt to confine the spirit within 
certain definite moulds. But even here his irony did 
not spare his companions in the cause so far as they 
themselves had any definite constructive programme. His 
underlying mood is always that of contemptuous pity 
for beings who even in their most serious concerns are 
the dupes of mobile appearances. 

" Les petites marionnettes 
Font, font, font 
Trois petits tours, 
Et puis s'en vont." l 

But the little marionettes, as M. France sees them, are 
thoroughly vicious and depraved, the playthings of 
hunger and the reproductive instinct. At bottom his 
view of life is at least as brutally naturalistic as that of 
Zola. " The substance of human nature/' he affirms, 
" does not change, and this substance is harsh, egotisti- 
cal, jealous, sensual, ferocious." 2 One may say, in his 
own words and with his own works in mind, that there 
is something strangely acrid in contemporary thought ; 
our literature no longer believes in the goodness of 
1 See La Vie lit., I, 58. 2 Ibid,, iv, 48. 



320 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

things. 1 His irony, which is at its blandest in "Le Crime 
de Sylvestre Bonnard," becomes in later works, like 
"L'lle des Pingouins," positively corrosive. 

It was therefore not inappropriate that M. France 
should have pronounced a eulogy over Zola's grave, in 
spite of the fact that a few years before he had spoken 
of him with a bitterness in strange contrast to the habit- 
ual appreciativeness of his critical writing. " His work 
is bad," he had said of Zola, " and he is one of those 
wretches of whom one may say it would have been bet- 
ter if they had never been born." 2 The explanation 
of the contradiction is simple enough : if M. France 
does not differ from Zola in his naturalistic view of life 
(except that on the whole he is less optimistic), he does 
differ from him infinitely in form and in his conception 
of the role of form. Be like the Greeks, is the sum of 
M. France's message ; since all is illusion and truth es- 
capes us, let us pursue beauty 3 (he should have said, 
be like certain Greeks, especially certain Greek sophists). 
About the only inheritance of the past that his irony 
spares, and that he is even ready to defend, is the an- 
cient classics and the education founded upon them. 
His own style is richly reminiscent of the past and in 
its fusion of traditional elements has been compared to 
Corinthian metal. It has all the Alexandrian graces, 
however much it may fall short of the truly classical 
vigor. It is the extreme flower of the Latin genius, says 
M. Lemaitre. We may add that it is also the extreme 
flower of romantic sestheticism. M. France puts more 
1 La Vie lit., iv, 14. 3 Ibid., I 236. 3 Ibid., I, 343 f . 



BRUNETIERE 321 

emphasis than most modern aesthetes, however, on the 
side of beauty that is related to symmetry as compared 
with the side that is related to expression. He is more 
enamored of the purity of the line both in art and 
language than M. Lemaitre, for example, who pursues 
the vivid and the expressive even at the risk of narrow- 
ing unduly the gap between the written and the spoken 
word. He is not only more intuitive of form than most 
of his contemporaries, but has in some measure that 
sense of the human that has been so conspicuously ab- 
sent in many of the writers and critics of our natural- 
istic period. " You are saddened," he says of Hugo, 
" and at the same time frightened not to encounter in 
his enormous work, in the midst of so many monsters, 
a single human figure." 1 

M. France may perhaps best be defined as a humanistic 
aesthete — the definition I have already applied to Walter 
Pater, who is indeed the writer with whom the English 
or American reader almost inevitably compares him. 
Pater's prose has, however, less purity of contour than 
M. France's, nor would he have been capable, I believe, 
of reacting so humanistically on Hugo. Though quite 
as aesthetic in his point of view as M. France, Pater 
was, to do him justice, less profoundly voluptuous. I 
remember having seen a volume of M. France from 
which a distinguished American scholar, who valued 
him greatly on his humanistic side, had nevertheless 
torn out a whole series of pages — the same treatment 
that Joubert accorded so liberally to his library of 

1 La Vie lit, 1, 115. 



322 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

eighteenth-century authors. The contrast is also less 
sharp in Pater than in M. France between a sensibility 
that is steeped in romantic religiosity and an intellect 
that is increasingly impious. M. France's heart revels in 
Saint Francis at the same time that his head demands 
Voltaire. One is equally conscious, however, in Pater 
and M. France of an epicurean relaxation that is com- 
bined in both writers with a great suavity. In both 
writers we feel " to the full," in Pater's own phrase, 
" that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a 
refined and comely decadence." Pater has been a doubt- 
ful influence in England. As to M. France's influence, 
Greard accused him to his face, on receiving him into 
the Academy, of having encouraged les songeries mal- 
saines et les dilettantismes dissolvants. 

The dangers of a humanism that has deserted the 
character and will and taken refuge in the sensibility 
are indeed obvious. Some of the utterances 1 of M. 
France fall very little short of the ultimate stage of 
aesthetic deliquescence, as embodied in the precious 
dictum of the anarchistic Laurent Tailhade, "What 
matters the act provided the gesture be beautiful ? " 
One feels that M. France would not balk at any cor- 
ruption if it were expressed with sufficient artistry. On 
the other hand, he is almost capable of a certain phari- 
saism of taste in dealing with the vulgar and the com- 
monplace. " He has no taste," he says of Zola, " and 
that I have finally come to believe is the mysterious sin 
spoken of in Holy Writ, the greatest of sins, the only 
1 See, for example, La Vie lit, n, p. iii. 



BRUNETIERE 323 

one that will not be pardoned." l Perhaps the best ex- 
ample of his tendency towards a pharisaism of taste is his 
onslaught on Georges Ohnet. 2 M. Lemaitre was at least 
as effective when he prefaced his article on the same 
subject by the remark that ordinarily he regaled his 
readers with literary subjects, and that he hoped they 
would pardon him if to-day he spoke to them of the 
novels of M. Georges Ohnet. 

M. France, in thus giving expression to an occasional 
violent antipathy, differs from Pater, who virtually 
never departs from the note of appreciation. But in 
general 1*1. France would reduce his role as a critic to 
an expression of " gentle wonderment at the beauty of 
things." He is a dreamer, as he tells us, and interested 
in things less for themselves than for what they can 
suggest to him. "All books, even the most admirable, 
appear to me vastly less precious for what they contain 
than for what the reader puts into them." 3 The wondrous 
dream suggested to Pater by Mona Lisa and her smile 
is perhaps the best example in English of a critic nar- 
rating the adventures of his soul in the presence of a 
masterpiece. We have the method at its worst in the 
passage of M. France that so scandalized Brunetiere ; 
the passage in which he sets out to give us a criticism of 
Renan's "History of the People of Israel," and indulges 
instead in a revery on the Noah's ark with which he 
played as a child. 

The whole procedure implies a certain confusion of 
the genres, an unwillingness to discriminate between 

1 La Vie lit, i, 233. 2 La Vie lit., n, 56 ff. 8 La Vie lit, n, p. xi. 



324 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

criticism and creation. M. Lemaitre, though he has also 
had ambitions as a creator, keeps far more distinct the 
creative and critical attitudes. Possibly M. France would 
have done more with criticism if he had felt more 
keenly its separate justification. As it is, in his total 
career as a writer, the literary criticism, at least in 
the narrower sense of the word, is little more than 
episodic. 

v 

Brunetiere at any rate gave no divided allegiance to 
criticism, and more than any man of his generation cul- 
tivated it as a clear-cut type. M. France's depreciation 
of judgment in criticism and indeed of the very genre 
itself arose, as I have tried to show, from his extreme 
sense of relativity, which is in turn a product of nat- 
uralism. The force of this naturalistic movement is 
shown by the fact that Brunetiere, who fought it in so 
many ways, was himself anxious to enlist in its service 
on its scientific if not on its aesthetic side. He battled 
for the integrity of the type, yet granted that it was 
involved in the flux. 

Sainte-Beuve, almost alone of modern critics, suc- 
ceeded in practising criticism both as a science and as 
an art ; or, as he himself puts it, in combining poetry 
with physiology. Taine attempted to make of criticism 
a pure science, while others, like M. Lemaitre, have cul- 
tivated it almost entirely as an art. Brunetiere also 
aimed to make of criticism both a science and an art, 
but it is evident at a first glance that his art is not the 
art of Sainte-Beuve. By his dogmatic temper he seemed 



BRUNETI&RE 325 

fitted to keep alive the tradition which, begun in Latin 
by Scaliger, was continued in French by a series of 
critics extending from Malherbe and Boileau to Nisard ; 
though from the outset he was, in virtue of his historic 
sense, nearer than these men to the relativists. In 
1889, in the lectures he gave at the Normal School, 
he announced his intention of becoming scientific as 
well as historical, of seeking the same help from the 
doctrines of Haeckel and Darwin that Taine had sought 
from the doctrines of Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint- 
Hilaire. This literary Darwinism of Brunetiere is in 
general an attempt to demonstrate that the different 
literary genres evolve in much the same way as the 
animal species. He proposes to show " in virtue of what 
circumstances of time and place they originate; how 
they grow after the manner of living beings, adapting 
or assimilating all that helps their development ; how 
they perish ; and how their disintegrated elements enter 
into the formation of a new genre." 1 For instance, the 
mediaeval Chansons de Geste ramified into prose chron- 
icles and Round Table romances and these romances in 
the course of evolution passed over into the modern 
novel. 

Brunetiere's evolutionary theory is defensible when 
thus stated in general terms. We feel, however, that in 
the working-out of his system, scholasticism has often 
got the better of science, and that he has been led astray 
by his love of logical symmetry. For example, Darwin 
attempted to account for the origin of species by sup- 

1 L 1 Evolution de la poesie lyrique, I, 5. 



326 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

posing that certain animals tend, for some unexplained 
reason, even under the same influences of environment, 
to diverge and become different from others of their 
kind. In the same way, Brunetiere tells us, individuals 
appear from time to time who have the power to modify 
the course of literature and to originate new literary 
genres. He thus uses a doubtful analogy with what is 
itself hypothetical in Darwin's doctrine to explain 
the one supremely important event in art, namely, the 
rise of a creator. If Brunetiere's parallel be exact, the 
individual who innovates in literature does so in obedi- 
ence to a blind cosmic impulse rather than by a deli- 
berate act of his own will. The genres, as M. Le- 
maitre points out, become in his hands pure scholastic 
entities, vegetative abstractions, evolving in virtue of a 
life of their own, and with little reference to the authors 
through whose brains they pass. The valuable germ of 
truth in Brunetiere's evolutionary theory is already 
contained in a simple phrase of Aristotle's " Poetics " : 
" Tragedy after passing through various transformations 
finally attained its true nature and there it stopped." 
The danger of pushing too far the biological analogy 
in dealing with the literary genres may best be stated in 
Brunetiere's own words : " We should take special care 
not to transform what are, after all, simple metaphors into 
sovereign laws of criticism. In the midst of these am- 
bitious generalizations the sense of the individual is 
lost. We become accustomed to value the men and 
works of the past only as they can be made to serve 
our own theories, and life in its diversity and rich com- 



BRUNETI^RE 327 

plexity escapes us, and eludes the rigid formulae in 
which we seek to confine it." His failure to carry through 
his evolutionary programme may have been due in some 
measure to the perception on his part that it was not 
possible to do so, at least in detail, without falling into 
pseudo-science. 

But how does Brunetiere, after thus abandoning to 
evolution, to the region of the relative, nearly every- 
thing that was regarded by old-time critics as fixed and 
stationary, manage to find a basis for " dogmatic " criti- 
cism? What standard is there raised above the realm 
of flux and change, with reference to which a work of 
art may be ranked as good or bad? How are we to es- 
cape in our literary judgments from the web of illusion 
thrown about us by our own temperaments, and from 
the fancies and passing fashions of the society in which 
we live ? How, finally, are we to be rescued from the 
impressions of M. Anatole France? Brunetiere's imme- 
diate answer to these questions, is that we must subor- 
dinate our sensations and emotions to reason. If we 
enter more deeply into his thought, we find that he was 
led in the search for an absolute to what may be termed 
the belief in an absolute man, to the Platonic, or the 
scholastic conception of " humanity." He would measure 
the value of a work of art according as it expresses this 
universal and essential humanity ; according as it unites 
the power of giving a high degree of aesthetic pleasure 
with that of suggesting truly human thoughts and 
emotions. 

The doctrine of the absolute man is in itself only a 



328 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

metaphysical abstraction, and Brunetiere refused to rest 
his criticism directly upon it. For an absolute based on 
this speculative unity of the human spirit he substituted 
in practice an absolute based on the unity of the human 
spirit as it has manifested itself in history. To the per- 
sonal preferences and impressions of any particular man 
he opposes the testimony and experience of all men as 
embodied in tradition. That writer is most truly human, 
and consequently most worthy of praise, who has appealed 
through successive generations to the largest number of 
men. An opinion carries weight with Brunetiere in pro- 
portion as it is ancient and universal. He did not hesitate 
to curtail the individual's right of independent judg- 
men, as he curtailed the individual's right of independent 
creation, and all to the greater glory and profit of human 
nature in general. The question at issue between Bru- 
netiere and the impressionists is so fundamental that I 
have reserved the full discussion of it for the closing 
chapter. 

VI 

Enough has been said to make clear that the great 
problem of Brunetiere' s life was that of finding stand- 
ards to oppose to the universal laxity and self-indulg- 
ence of his time, — to what he called the " morbid and 
monstrous development of the me " * ; and that his 
solution of this problem was from the outset extremely 
conservative. The reactionary tendencies of the last 
ten years of his life follow naturally enough from his 
earlier assumptions, especially the assumption that 

1 Questions de Critique, 214. 



BRUNETIERE 329 

there is needed a principle of restraint in human na- 
ture (un principe refrenant), and that this principle 
cannot be evolved by the individual himself, but must 
be "exterior, anterior and superior" to the individual. 
As a result of its loss of traditional standards, modern 
society seemed to him to be plunging into a bottomless 
morass of impressionism. Of course the modern school 
gets around Brunetiere's difficulty by offering as a sub- 
stitute for the principle of restraint the principle of 
brotherhood; each man is to give a loose rein to his 
own instincts and " originality," and then temper this 
explosion of egoism by sympathy with an equally free 
play of individual impulse in others. This is the theory of 
fraternal anarchy found in Rousseau, and in his Amer- 
ican congener, Walt Whitman. But modern France, 
according to Brunetiere, has, in following Rousseau, 
taken a madman for its guide. He thinks we may 
make fine distinctions about different kinds of individ- 
ualism, but in practice they are all synonyms for ego- 
ism ; they all offer an undue opening to " the mobility 
of our impressions, the unruliness of our individual sense, 
and the vagrancy of our thought." * 

In other words, Brunetiere fails to escape from the 
vicious dilemma of nineteenth-century thought which 
would either sacrifice the individual to society or society 
to the individual; which fails to find a middle ground 
between anarchical self-assertion and a collectivism 
that would crush individual initiative. We may at least 
agree with him that a society that discards all the tra- 

1 Discours de combat, 2[ s&rie, 151. 



330 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

ditional ways of unifying life, and then thinks it can 
get on without working out any new unity to oppose 
to individual impulse, may turn out to be strangely de- 
luded. The opposing attitudes of Brunetiere and M. 
France towards this problem have at least the merit of 
reflecting faithfully a main line of cleavage in contem- 
porary French thought. Indeed, one can scarcely speak 
of the need of respect, authority and discipline in 
France without at once being set down as a reaction- 
ary. If France does not get beyond this stage, and yet 
prospers in a large way, all the sages of the past will 
have been convicted of error in their views of human 
nature ; and this in itself will be a result of consider- 
able interest. 

The reasons that led Brunetiere into the Catholic 
Church should now be clear. It alone seemed to him to 
afford the discipline and the definite standards that could 
protect society against the individual. The motives 
for his conversion, as he himself says, were " social " ; 
they are certainly as far removed as possible from the 
motives of those who are drawn into the Church by the 
aesthetic charm of its ritual. Of this form of epicureanism 
he remarks contemptuously that "sensuality is not reli- 
gion." He turned to Catholicism simply because it seemed 
to him to hold out the hope of a better-ordered social 
progress, of a more thoroughly disciplined collectivism. 
It is misleading to say, as is often done, that Brunetiere 
had a " seventeenth-century soul," or, like M. de Vogue, 
to compare him with Bossuet and Pascal. Brunetiere's 
constant preoccupation with the humanitarian problem 



BRUNETIERE 331 

— the future of society and the relations of man to 
his fellow-man — savors of Auguste Comte rather than 
of Bossuet. In his inner mood, again, he has more in com- 
mon with Schopenhauer than with Pascal. It is enough 
to compare Brunetiere's " social reasons " with the bit of 
parchment found sewn into Pascal's coat, on which he 
had recorded the details of his conversion (night of 
November 23, 1654). Pascal sums up this sudden illu- 
mination in the words, often repeated, " Joy, certainty, 
peace." Brunetiere was a true child of his age in that 
he sought salvation in work and not in meditation ; or 
rather, for the stoic Brunetiere as for the epicurean 
Sainte-Beuve, work was, by their own avowal, a means 
of escape from the abyss of metaphysical despair. 
Brunetiere was accused of being out of touch with his 
time. On the contrary, if his work fails to wear well, it 
may be because he was in too close touch with his time. 
He lacked the intuitions by which alone one can escape 
from the spirit of the age into the spirit of the ages. 
He had little experience of that wisdom which Joubert 
defines as "repose in the light.' ' He is also very in- 
ferior to Sainte-Beuve and even to M. Lemaitre in 
aesthetic perceptiveness. To this poverty in the two 
main types of intuition is to be attributed his small 
power of either emotional or intellectual suggestion. 
He is always lucid but rarely luminous. " He sets such 
great store," says M. Lemaitre, "on precision, that 
nothing exists for him which cannot be expressed with 
rigorous exactness." 1 (This is the trait, it will be re- 

1 Contemporains, I, 225. 



332 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

membered, that Charles Lamb discovered in Scotchmen 
and that led him to say that his own mind was in its 
constitution essentially anti-Caledonian.) 

Brunetiere's lack of intuitiveness impairs not only 
his defence of religious tradition, — it impairs also his 
defence of tradition in literature. He did not take suf- 
ficiently into account in either religion or literature the 
aristocratic elements that make directly for the perfect- 
ing of the individual and only indirectly for the per- 
fecting of society. What Sainte-Beuve lamented in the 
decay of humane letters was the disappearance from the 
world of delicacy and distinction, and not simply the 
weakening of a discipline. The point may be made 
clear by comparing the attitude of the two men towards 
Balzac. Both Balzac and Hugo are indeed veritable 
touchstones for the critic, being as they are writers of 
immense power, but a power Titanic and Cyclopean 
rather than human. Brunetiere ascribes Sainte-Beuve's 
hostility to Balzac to personal pique and jealousy. Per- 
sonal pique there certainly was, but the underlying 
ground of Sainte-Beuve's hostility, as I have tried to 
show elsewhere, was his humanism — the fact, as he 
himself says, that " he still belongs in spite of every- 
thing to the classical school." Sainte-Beuve shows him- 
self a better humanist than Brunetiere, when he admires 
Balzac's exuberant creative energy, but at the same 
time is repelled by his violence and lack of measure. 

Many readers of Brunetiere's volume on Balzac have 
doubtless been puzzled by his warmth of admiration for 
a writer who, as he truly says, had immense influence 



BRUNETIERE 333 

in promoting the whole French naturalistic movement 
from Taine to Zola, and was himself an unchained force 
of nature. 1 Did not Brunetiere begin his career as a 
critic by an onslaught on the naturalistic novel, and 
is he not always urging us to react against the " natu- 
ralism that we still have in our blood/ ' and become 
" idealists " ? The difficulty will be at least partly solved 
if we remember that Balzac and Brunetiere both became 
Catholics and for somewhat similar reasons. Balzac 
failed to find in the individual life any resource against 
itself ; he depicted it not as a struggle between a higher 
and a lower nature, but merely as the unfolding of a 
master impulse that is determined in turn by the pres- 
sure of an infinitely complex environment ; he was un- 
able to conceive of any inner avenue of escape for the 
individual from his own egoism and subjectivity, and 
so he opposed to individualism a social solidarity that 
receives its ultimate sanction from the Church. Like 
Brunetiere he sides with society against the individual. 
In their return to the discipline of the past, Brunetiere 
and Balzac both take their point of departure in natu- 
ralistic pessimism. If we had no other evidence in the 
case of Brunetiere his sympathetic study of Schopen- 
hauer would suffice. 

An inevitable question arises in dealing with this 
difficult relationship between Brunetiere's " naturalism," 
and his " idealism " : How did he reconcile his keen 
sense of historical relativity with the need imposed by 
his logic of an outer absolute ? His most evident ambi- 

1 Le Roman naturaliste, 165. 



334 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

tion as a thinker is to combine the faith of the past in 
what is stable with the modern idea of development. 
Even dogma itself evolves, he asserts, and in all this 
part of his thought it is easy enough to trace the influ- 
ence of Cardinal Newman. His plea for a Catholicism 
that would develop in harmony with some of the aspir- 
ations of modern democracy found favor with Leo XIII, 
but has been far less acceptable to the present Pope. 
Brunetiere entered the Church to escape from individ- 
ualism and then towards the end found himself treated 
as a heretic. The final impression, as in the case of 
Taine and so many other eminent personalities of the 
last century, is that of a great spiritual solitude. 

Some of the arguments Brunetiere brings to the 
defence of tradition are certainly surprising. In fact 
one suspects in him a violent love of paradox which he 
gratifies not by attacking the general sense of mankind, 
but by the means he employs in defending it. It is, he 
confesses, an undertaking at once hazardous and novel 
to press into the service of Catholic orthodoxy Comte's 
" Positive Philosophy " and the " Origin of Species." 
He identifies the scientific doctrine of heredity and the 
dogma of original sin, draws a parallel between the 
American Constitution and the Roman Church, and 
brings Darwin to the aid of St. Vincent de Lerins. We 
may well refuse to follow him in these bizarre associa- 
tions ; yet we must recognize that he is wrestling man- 
fully all the while with what is the central problem of 
contemporary thought, the problem how to adjust the 
rival claims of " being " and " becoming " ; how to re- 



BRUNETIERE 335 

tain the conquests of naturalism and at the same time 
assert the integrity of that part of man which is above 
phenomenal nature. 

Brunetiere, indeed, has an almost unerring instinct 
for the large and vital questions, even when he misses 
the right solution of them. He is instructive in his 
errors, even in his failure to recognize that the remedy 
for the excesses of individualism must be a saner indi- 
vidualism, that the lance of Achilles can alone heal the 
wound it has made. There are few more effective anti- 
dotes to impressionism than to read him through with 
a view to refuting him. He may be recommended as a 
corrective to those who suffer from epicurean indolence 
and unwillingness to think. It is some distinction to 
have attained, as Brunetiere did, even to a logical cos- 
mos in an age whose current philosophy would seem to 
be what a Harvard undergraduate, replying to a ques- 
tion as to the religion of China, described as confusion- 
ism. The atmosphere that surrounds his work has the 
stoic bleakness ; yet he is tonic by the very faith he feels 
in the virtues of clear and consistent reasoning. " Who of 
us," says Brunetiere, " is without his weaknesses ? Mine 

— one of mine — has always been to love doctrinaires; 
and see how indulgent I am towards them : I pardon them 
not only for having had doctrines and for having de- 
fended them sturdily, but for having changed doctrines, 
every time they have given good reasons for so doing, 

— I mean good doctrinal ones." 1 He is convinced that 
" ideas govern the world." 2 Herein he differs from M. 

1 Nouveaux essais de lit. cont., 314. 2 Discours de combat, 2 e sdrie, 172. 



336 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Faguet, a really distinguished thinker, who has no be- 
lief in the practical efficacy of thought; and that is 
perhaps why much of M. Faguet's work, brilliant as it 
undoubtedly is, fails to leave its sting. " Take Rous- 
seau from the history of the eighteenth century," writes 
Brunetiere, " and you put off the Revolution by perhaps 
twenty or twenty -five years ; take from his writings the 
' Social Contract ' and you make the Jacobin programme 
impossible; take from the * Social Contract' itself merely 
the sixth and seventh chapters of the fourth book, and 
you suppress Robespierre." Fortunately the connection 
between logic and life is not always so close. 

Brunetiere had only contempt for those who would 
divorce scholarship from ideas, or who, having ideas, fail 
to subordinate them to some serious end ; contempt for 
the dilettantes and impressionists who see in literature 
only the occasion for an agreeable vagabondage of the 
intellect or sensibility ; likewise for those who lose them- 
selves in over-minute investigations: for instance, the 
man who devoted a volume of five hundred pages to 
proving that Moliere died at No. 40 and not at No. 34 
Rue Richelieu ; or the man who searched through the 
records of Paris churches — eighty manuscript volumes 
— in order to determine the exact date of the birth of 
Ninon de Lenclos ! In one of his most vigorous papers 
(" La Fureur de Tlnedit ") he assails what is perhaps 
the main fetish of modern scholarship, — " original " 
research. " Science and conscientiousness," he exclaims, 
" delicacy of taste, tact, the art of selection and compos- 
ition, feeling for style, felicity of expression, art or 



BRUNETlfeRE 337 

grace, eloquence or strength, all that formerly went 
under the name of talent or even genius, — do any of 
these qualities really count in the eyes of a decipherer 
of texts or an editor of unpublished documents? And 
public opinion, which they have already more than half 
corrupted, seems likely soon to side with them." * Bru- 
netiere waged continuous war on this tendency of 
scholarship towards Alexandrianism, towards what Bacon 
termed, in speaking of spelling reform, " unprofitable 
subtleties." No one in his generation so emphasized the 
relationship between literature and thought, the relation- 
ship between thought itself and life. 

" Le vrai Dieu, le Dieu fort, est le Dieu des ide'es." 

It is a pity that the needed example he sets in this 
respect should be compromised by the reactionary trend 
of his thinking ; that men who are his inferiors in the 
scholarship of ideas and even in the scholarship of facts 
should yet have the advantage, in attacking him, of at 
least seeming to be champions of the modern spirit. 

1 Nouvelles questions de critique, 28. 



XI 

CONCLUSION 

We are told that Louis XIV once submitted a son- 
net he had written to the judgment of Boileau, who 
said, after reading it : " Sire, nothing is impossible for 
your Majesty. You set out to write some bad verses 
and you have succeeded." The point of this story for 
the modern reader lies not so much in the courage of 
the critic as in the meekness of the king. With the 
progress of democracy one man's opinion in literature 
has come to be as good as another's, — a deal better, 
too, the Irishman would add, — and such words as de- 
ference and humility are in a fair way to become obso- 
lete. We can scarcely conceive to what an extent men 
once allowed their personal impressions to be overawed 
and held in check by a body of outer prescriptions. 
Only a century ago an Edinburgh reviewer could write : 
" Poetry has thus much at least in common with reli- 
gion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain 
inspired writers whose authority it is no longer lawful 
to question." 1 Racine tells us that the audience was 
afraid at the first performance of his comedy "Les 
Plaideurs," that " it had not laughed according to the 
rules." 

The revolt came at last from this tyranny of the 
" rules," and the romantic critics opposed to the neo- 

1 Article on Southey, Edinburgh Review, October, 1802. 



CONCLUSION 339 

classic narrowness their plea for wider knowledge and 
wider sympathy ; they would see before they began to 
oversee, and be historical rather than dogmatic ; they 
would neither exclude nor conclude, but explain ; above 
all, they would be appreciative, and substitute the fruit- 
ful criticism of beauties for the barren criticism of 
faults. The weakness of this whole school has been its 
proneness to forget that knowledge and sympathy are 
after all only the feminine virtues of the critic. Hence 
the absence of the masculine note in so much modern 
criticism, hence the tendency of judgment to be swal- 
lowed up completely in sympathy and comprehension — 
tout comprendre, c'est tout par donner. Renan, one of 
the most perfect embodiments of the ideal of wider 
knowledge and wider sympathy, says that when any one 
was presented to him he tried to enter into this person's 
point of view, and serve up to him his own ideas in 
advance. One thinks almost involuntarily of Dr. John- 
son and how, when people disagreed with him, he " roared 
them down " ; how men like Reynolds and Gibbon and 
Burke ventured to present their protest to him only in 
the form of a Round Robin so that the awful Aris- 
tarch might not know on whom first to visit his wrath. 
It is of course well, and indeed indispensable, that the 
critic should cultivate the feminine virtues, but on con- 
dition, as Tennyson has put it, that he be man-woman and 
not woman-man. Through neglect of this truth criti- 
cism has tended in its development during the past cen- 
tury to become first a form of history, and then a form 
of biography, and finally a form of gossip. History and 



340 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

biography remind us in their gradual encroachments 
upon critical judgment of those mayors of the palace in 
Merovingian times who insinuated themselves under 
cover of the services they rendered and at last thrust 
themselves into their masters' place. It is true that 
judgment would not have been thus dispossessed if it 
had not first shown itself a roi faineant 



Sainte-Beuve himself, as we saw, labored during the 
latter part of his life to correct, or one might more 
fairly say to complete, his earlier method and to assert 
once more the supremacy of judgment. It is curious to 
trace the transformation of the militant romanticist of 
1830 into the conservative who finally extols as the true 
type of the critic Malherbe and Boileau and Dr. John- 
son. He follows these men in founding his own judg- 
ments for the most part on the traditional standards of 
the classicist, yet no one knew better than Sainte-Beuve 
that these standards were doomed. " Let us be the last of 
our kind," he exclaims, " before the great confusion." 1 

The " great confusion " that Sainte-Beuve foresaw is 
now upon us. I pointed out that he himself has been 
correctly defined in his influence on his successors, not 
as a defender of standards and judgment, but as a great 
doctor of relativity. Now nearly all recent criticism, so 
far as it is anything more than a form of gossip and 
small talk, may be roughly classified as either impres- 
sionistic or scientific ; and it is in this doctrine of rela- 
1 Portraits litteraires, m, 550. 



CONCLUSION 341 

tivity that both impressionistic and scientific critics 
unite. The impressionist is interested in a book only as 
it relates itself to his sensibility, and his manner of 
praising anything that makes this appeal to him is to 
say that it is " suggestive." The scientific critic for his 
part is interested solely in the way a book is related as 
a phenomenon to other phenomena, and when it is the 
culminating point or the point of departure of a large 
number of these relationships, he says that it is " sig- 
nificant" (the favorite word of Goethe). If the impres- 
sionist is asked to rise above his sensibility and judge 
by a more impersonal standard, he answers that there 
is no such impersonal element in art, but only " suggest- 
iveness," and is almost ready to define art with a recent 
French writer as an " attenuated hypnosis." If the 
scientific critic in turn is urged to get behind the phe- 
nomena and rate a book with reference to a scale of 
absolute values, he absconds into his theory of the 
" unknowable." 

We may illustrate by a familiar passage from Taine, 
who is easily the most eminent of those who have 
attempted to make criticism scientific. " What do we 
see," he says in his English Literature, "under the fair 
glazed pages of a modern poem ? A modern poet who 
has studied and travelled, a man like Alfred de Musset, 
Victor Hugo, Lamartine or Heine, in a black coat and 
gloves, welcomed by the ladies, and making every even- 
ing his fifty bows and his score of bons-mots in society ; 
reading the papers in the morning, lodging as a rule on 
a second floor ; not over gay, because he has nerves, and 



342 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

especially because, in this dense democracy where we 
stifle one another, the discredit of official dignities has 
exaggerated his pretensions, while increasing his import- 
ance, and because the keenness of his feelings in general 
rather disposes him to think himself a god." 

Now in the first place the results of this attempt to 
infer from a poem the life and personality of the poet 
are strangely uncertain. We read in the recently pub- 
lished letters of John Richard Green that when Taine 
was in England getting information for the last vol- 
ume of his " English Literature," he began talking about 
Tennyson with Palgrave, a great friend of the laureate. 
" Was n't he in early youth rich, luxurious, fond of 
pleasure, self-indulgent ? " Taine asked. " I see it all 
in his early poems — his riot, his adoration of physical 
beauty, his delight in jewels, in the abandonment of all 
to pleasure, in wine, and ..." " Stop ! stop ! " said 
Palgrave, out of all patience. " As a young man Tenny- 
son was poor — he had little more than one hundred 
pounds a year, his habits were, as they still are, simple 
and reserved, he cared then as he cares now for little more 
than a chat and a pipe ; he has never known luxury in 
your sense." Taine thanked Palgrave for his informa- 
tion — and when the book came out Tennyson was found 
still painted as the young voluptuary of the critic's 
fancy. 1 

Even assuming that Taine's inferences could be drawn 
correctly, he would have us fix our attention on precisely 

1 Letters of John Richard Green, 372. Green's anecdote is perhaps not 
entirely fair to Taine's account of Tennyson as it finally appeared. 



CONCLUSION 343 

those features of a poem that are least poetical. The very 
prosaic facts he is looking for would be at least as visi- 
ble in the writing of some mediocrity as in a work of 
the first order. It is, indeed, when Taine starts out to 
deal in this fashion with a poet of genius like Milton, 
to reduce "Paradise Lost" to a mere "sign," that the 
whole method is seen to be grotesquely inadequate. 
"Adam," says Taine in his critique of Milton, "is your 
true pater-familias with a vote, an M.P., an old Oxford 
man," etc. He listens to the conversation of Adam and 
Eve, the first pair, only to hear "an English household, 
two reasoners of the period — Colonel Hutchinson and 
his wife. Good heavens ! dress them at once " ; and he 
continues in this vein for pages. 

But, says M. Bourget, speaking for the impressionists, 
there is another way of approaching the volume of verse 
that Taine would treat solely from the point of view of 
its "significance"; and in rendering the "suggestive- 
ness " of the volume to the impressionist sensibility, M. 
Bourget proceeds to employ a luxuriance of epithet that 
lack of space forbids our quoting. He asks us to imagine 
a young woman alone in her boudoir on an overcast 
winter afternoon. A vague melancholy steals upon her 
as she reclines at ease in her long chair ; all a-quiver 
with ineffable longing, she turns to her favorite poet. 
She does not surmise behind the delicately tinted pages 
of the beloved book the prosaic facts of environment, 
the obscure animal origins of talent that are so visible 
to Taine. What she does perceive is the dream of the 
poet — " the inexpressible and mysterious beyond that 



344 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

he has succeeded in throwing like a halo round his 
verses." For Taine the stanzas are a result ; for the young 
woman " who intoxicates her heart with them so deli- 
ciously," they are a cause. " She does not care for the 
alembic in which the magic philter has been distilled, 
provided only this magic is operative, provided her read- 
ing culminates in an exquisite and trembling exaltation," 
and " suggests to her dreams either sweet or sad, but 
always productive of ecstasy." Who does not see, con- 
cludes M. Bourget, that entirely different theories of art 
are implied in the two ways of approaching the volume 
of verse? 1 

The two theories are different, indeed; yet they are 
alike in this, that neither the " significance " of the vol- 
ume to Taine nor its " suggestiveness " to M. Bourget 
affords any real means of escape from the quicksands of 
relativity to some firm ground of judgment. We may be 
sure that a third-rate bit of contemporary sentimentality 
will " suggest " more ineffable dreams to the young woman 
in the long chair than a play of Sophocles. To state the 
case more generally, how many books there are that were 
once infinitely suggestive and are still of the highest 
significance in literary history which yet intrinsically are 
now seen to be of very inferior value ! This is eminently 
true of certain writings of Rousseau, to whom much of 
the peculiar exaggeration of the sens propre, or individ- 
ual sense that one finds in the impressionists, can ulti- 
mately be traced. 2 If the special modes of sensibility that 

1 Abridged from the chapter on Taine in Essais de Psychologie contempo- 
raine. 

2 " Voici enfin Jean-Jacques, precurseur du xix e siecle, qui dans l'indi- 



CONCLUSION 345 

impressionism exhibits go back to Rousseau, its philo- 
sophical theory may best be considered as a reappearance 
in modern thought of the ancient maxim that man is 
the measure of all things. This celebrated dictum be- 
came current at a decisive moment in Greek life and 
would indeed seem to sum up almost necessarily the point 
of view of any age that has cast off traditional standards. 
The all-important question is whether one interprets the 
maxim in the spirit of the sophists or in that of Socrates. 
The resemblance between the impressionistic and the 
sophistical understanding of the maxim is unmistakable ; 
not only the individual man, but his present sensations 
and impressions are to be made the measure of all things. 
" All of us," says M. Anatole France, "judge everything 
by our own measure. How could we do otherwise, since 
to judge is to compare, and we have only one measure, 
which is ourselves ; and this measure is constantly chang- 
ing? We are all of us the sport and playthings of mobile 
appearances." * Perhaps no recent writer has shown more 
of the Socratic spirit in his use of the maxim than Emer- 
son. " A true man," he says, " belongs to no other time 
and place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, 
there is nature. He measures you and all men and all 
events." Though Emerson thus asserts the maxim, he 
has not therefore succumbed, like M. France, to the doc- 
trine of relativity and the feeling of universal illusion 
that accompanies it ; on the contrary, he has attained to 

vidu, c'est-a-dire dans le Moi affectif et passionnel, voit la mesure unique 
de toute chose." Pellissier, Etudes de Litterature contemporaine. Cf. Bru- 
netiere, Nouvelles questions de critique, 214. 
1 Vie lit., i, 318. 



346 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

a new sense of the unity of human nature — a unity 
founded, not on tradition, but on insight. He says some- 
where that he finds such an identity both of thought 
and sentiment in the best books of the world, that they 
seem to him to be the work of " one all-seeing, all-hear- 
ing gentleman." Now it is evidently this one all-seeing, 
all-hearing gentleman who is for Emerson the measure 
of all things. The individual man is the measure of all 
things only in so far as he has realized in himself this 
essential human nature. To be sure, the line is often 
hard to draw in practice between the two types of in- 
dividualist. There were persons in ancient Athens — for 
example, Aristophanes in the " Clouds " — who treated 
Socrates as an ordinary sophist. In the same way, there 
are persons to-day who fail to see the difference between 
Emerson and an ordinary impressionist. " The source of 
Emerson's power," says Professor Santayana, "lay not in 
his doctrine but in his temperament.' ' 1 

Emerson's language is often indistinguishable from 
that of the impressionist. "I would write on the lintels 
of my doorpost, whim" " Dream delivers us to dream, 
and there is no end to illusion." "Life is a flux of 
moods." But he is careful to add that " there is that in 
us which changes not and which ranks all sensations 
and states of mind." The impressionist denies this ele- 
ment of absolute judgment and so feels free to indulge 
his temperament with epicurean indolence ; at the same 
time he has the contemptuous indulgence for others 
that befits beings who are the " sport and playthings of 

1 Poetry and Religion, 218. 



CONCLUSION 347 

mobile appearances." M. France says that he "despises 
men tenderly." We would reply in the words of Burke 
that the " species of benevolence which arises from con- 
tempt is no true charity." Impressionism has led to a 
strange increase in the number of dilettantes and 
jouisseurs litteraires, who to the precept de gustibus 
non have given developments that would certainly 
have surprised its author. The Horatian plea for an 
honest liberty of taste has its necessary corrective in 
the truth that is very bluntly stated in a Spanish pro- 
verb : " There are tastes that deserve the cudgel." l We 
are told that Sainte-Beuve was once so offended by an 
outrageous offence to good taste in a remark of Nicol- 
ardot's, that, yielding to an irresistible impulse, he 
kicked him out of the room. Dante, in replying to a 
certain opponent, says, with the instinct of a true Ital- 
ian, that he would like to answer such " bestiality not 
with words but with a knife." We must remember that 
" good taste " as formerly understood was made up of 
two distinct elements : first, one's individual sensibility, 
and secondly, a code of outer rules by which this sen- 
sibility was disciplined and held in check. The observ- 
ance of these rules became for the community of well- 
bred people a sort of noblesse oblige, and taste in this 
sense has been rightly defined by Rivarol as a man's 
literary honor. Now that the outer code has been ab- 
rogated, taste is not therefore delivered over to the 
caprices of a vagrant sensibility ; taste is attained only 
when this sensibility is rectified with reference to 

1 " Hay gustos que merecen palos." 



^ . 



348 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

standards inwardly apprehended, and in this sense may 
be defined as a man's literary conscience ; it is, in short, 
only one aspect of the struggle between our lower and 
higher selves. Some, indeed, would maintain that taste 
is not a thing thus to be won by any effort of the will, 
but is rather an inborn and incommunicable tact, a sort 
of mysterious election, a free gift of the muses to a pre- 
destined few ; that in literature many are called and few 
are chosen. In the article " Gout " of the " Philosophi- 
cal Dictionary/ ' Voltaire discourses on the small num- 
ber of the elect in matters of taste, and in almost the 
next article (" Grace ") turns all his powers of mockery 
on those who assert the same doctrine in religion. Not 
only individuals but whole nations were once held to be 
under the reprobation of the muses. As Voltaire says 
sadly, presque tout Ihmivers est barbare. Perhaps even 
to-day persons might be found who would regard as le- 
gitimate the famous query of Father Bouhours whether 
a German can have wit. There are only too many 
examples in Germany and elsewhere of how far infinite 
industry and good intentions are from sufficing for the 
attainment of taste. However it may be in theology, 
it remains true in literature, as Gautier remarks, that 
works without grace are of no avail. 

But one may recognize an element of predestination 
in the problem of taste and not therefore acquiesce in 
the impressionist's preaching of the fatality and finality 
of temperament. Every one, to be sure, has an initial or 
temperamental taste, but it is hard to say how far this 
taste may be transformed by subordinating it to the 



CONCLUSION 349 

higher claims of our nature. Dr. Johnson says that if 
he had no duties and no reference to futurity he should 
spend his life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a 
pretty woman. Here then is the temperamental taste of 
Dr. Johnson, and if he had been a disciple of M. France, 
he might have accepted it as final. Boswell reports an 
outburst of Johnson on this very subject : " Do not, 
Sir, accustom yourself to trust to impressions. By 
trusting to impressions, a man may gradually come to 
yield to them, and at length be subject to them, so as 
not to be a free agent, or what is the same thing in effect, 
to suppose that he is not a free agent. A man who is in 
that state should not be suffered to live ; . . . there can 
be no confidence in him, no more than in a tiger." 

Johnson would evidently have agreed with the Bud- 
dhists in looking on the indolent settling down of a 
man in his own temperament * as the chief of all the 
deadly sins. A fulmination like the foregoing is good 
to clear the air after the debilitating sophistries of M. 
France. Yet we feel that Johnson's point of view im- 
plies an undue denial of the individual's right to his 
own impressions and that therefore it has become in 
some measure obsolete. It is well for us, after all, to 
have fresh and vivid and personal impressions ; it is 
well for us, in short, to awaken our senses; but we 
should "awaken our senses that we may the better 

1 This is the full meaning of the Pali term pamada. The opposite 
quality, appamdda, or strenuousness, — the unremitting exercise of the 
active will, — is the chief of the Buddhist virtues ; this Oriental strenuous- 
ness, one should hasten to add, is directed towards self-conquest and not, 
like the Occidental variety, towards the conquest of the outer world. 



350 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

judge " — and not simply that we may the better enjoy. 
For instance, Walter Pater continually dwells on the 
need of awakening our senses, but when he speaks of 
" living in the full stream of refined sensation," when 
he urges us to gather ourselves together "into one des- 
perate effort to see and touch," there is a hedonistic 
flavor in these utterances that can escape no one. On 
the other hand, there should be no ascetic denial of the 
value of the impression in itself. Brunetiere is reported 
to have said to another critic, whom he suspected of 
intellectual epicureanism, " You always praise what 
pleases you, / never do." 1 This is an asceticism of taste 
worthy of the spectator of Racine's comedy who wished 
to laugh according to the rules. And so Brunetiere 
was led naturally into his reactionary attitude ; seeing 
only the evil possibilities of individualism, he would 
have the modern man forego his claim to be the meas- 
ure of all things, and submit once more to outer author- 
ity. A certain type of seventeenth-century critic at- 
tempted to establish a standard that was entirely outside 
the individual. The impressionist has gone to the op- 
posite extreme and set up a standard that is entirely 
within the individual. The problem is to find some 
middle ground between Procrustes and Proteus ; and 
this right mean would seem to lie in a standard that is 
in the individual and yet is felt by him to transcend his 
personal self and lay hold of that part of his nature 
that he possesses in common with other men. 

1 See Lemaitre, Contemporains, vi, p. xi. Cf. Brunetiere, L'Evolution 
de la poe'sie tyrique, 25. 



CONCLUSION 351 

The impressionist not only refuses the individual man 
any such principle of judgment to which he may appeal 
from his fleeting impressions; he goes farther and 
refuses men collectively any avenue of escape from 
universal illusion and relativity; he denies in short the 
doctrine embodied in the old church maxim, Securus 
judicat orbis terrarum, a doctrine so fundamental, we 
may note in passing, that in the form attributed to 
Lincoln it has become the cornerstone of democracy : 
" You cannot fool all the people all the time." M. Ana- 
tole France is fond of insisting, like Sainte-Beuve before 
him, that there inheres in mankind as a whole no such 
power of righting itself and triumphing over its own 
errors and illusions. A whole chapter might be made 
up of passages from Sainte-Beuve on the vanity of fame. 
"Posterity has allowed three fourths of the works of 
antiquity to perish," says M. France in turn ; " it has 
allowed the rest to be frightfully corrupted. ... In the 
little that it has kept there are detestable books which 
are none the less immortal. Varius, we are told, was the 
equal of Virgil. He has perished. iElian was an ass, and 
he survives. There is posterity for you," 1 etc. Here 
again the contrast between the two types of individual- 
ist is absolute. " There is no luck in literary reputation," 
says Emerson. " They who make up the final verdict for 
every book are not the partial and noisy public of the 
hour, but a court as of angels; a public not to be bribed, 
not to be entreated, and not to be overawed decides 
upon every man's title to fame. Only those books come 

x Vie litteraire, I, 111. 



352 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

down which deserve to last. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or 
Pollock may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer 
stand forever. The permanence of all books is fixed by 
no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific 
gravity or the intrinsic importance of their contents to 
the constant mind of man." 

We should add, then, in order to define our critical 
standard completely, that the judgment of the keen- 
sighted few in the present needs to be ratified by the 
verdict of posterity. 1 

ii 

Such being in brief outline our critical standard, it 
remains to consider it more fully in its bearings on the 
main trend of contemporary life in France and elsewhere. 
It is evident that under existing conditions we can 
scarcely emphasize the first part of our definition too 
strongly (the keen-sighted few !). If it is not possible in 
literature to fool all the public all the time, it is only 
too possible to fool all or nearly all the public some of 
the time, and some of the public all the time. The op- 
posite opinion is encouraged by the force now most 
active in the world and definable as Rousseauistic de- 
mocracy. The Rousseauist, or, as I should not hesi- 
tate to call him, the pseudo-democrat (I am sorry I need 
so many "pseudos" in describing our modern activities), 
would eliminate from the norm the humanistic or aris- 

1 The appeal to the judgment of the keen-sighted few, as opposed to 
that of the many, appears in Aristotle, who always assumes an ideal 
reader, whom he refers to variously as 6 <rTov5dibs, 6 <ppbvifM>s, 6 ev<f>vr}s. The 
principle of universal consent as applied to literature is first clearly stated 
by Longinus (7re/>i fyovs, cap. vn). 



CONCLUSION 353 

tocratic element. He would value a book, not by its 
appeal to the keen-sighted few, but by its immediate 
effect on the average man. Tolstoy, it will be remem- 
bered, defends an extreme form of this fallacy, the hu- 
manitarian fallacy as we may term it, in his book on Art, 
and concludes that the masterpiece of nineteenth-cen- 
tury literature is " Uncle Tom's Cabin." Emerson, who 
has been our guide thus far, can be of little service to 
us here. He had humanitarian illusions of his own — 
illusions that he shared with his whole generation. 
" We," says Emerson, giving fresh expression to his 
favorite doctrine that man is the measure of all things, 
" We are the photometers, we the irritable gold-leaf and 
tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the subtle 
element. We know the authentic effects of the true fire 
through every one of its million disguises." One is 
naturally prompted to inquire whom Emerson means by 
this "we." Granting that man is a photometer or 
measure of light, it is yet absurd to add, as Emerson at 
times comes dangerously near doing, that this ideal 
measure exists unimpaired in the ordinary untrained 
individual. Elsewhere Emerson says of Goethe : " He 
hates to be trifled with and to repeat some old wife's 
fable that has had possession of men's faith these thou- 
sand years. I am here, he would say, to be the measure 
and judge of these things. Why should I take them on 
trust ? " This may do very well for Goethe, but when 
the man in the street thus sets up to be the measure of 
all things, the result is often hard to distinguish from 
vulgar presumption. The humanitarian fallacy would 



354 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

be comparatively harmless if it did not fit in so perfectly 
with a commercialism which finds its profit in flattering 
the taste of the average man, and an impressionism that 
has lost the restraining sense of tradition and encour- 
ages us to steep and saturate our minds in the purely 
contemporaneous. As it is, these elements have com- 
bined in a way that is a menace to all high and severe 
standards of taste. To use words as disagreeable as the 
things they describe, literature is in danger of being 
vulgarized and commercialized and journalized. There 
are critics who have founded a considerable reputation 
on the relationship that exists between their own medi- 
ocrity and the mediocrity of their readers. Sainte-Beuve 
says that in writing " we should ask ourselves from 
time to time with our brows uplifted towards the hilltops 
and our eyes fixed on the group of revered mortals : 
What would they say of us ? " We may contrast this 
advice with the familiar story of the American magazine 
editor who told his young contributor that there was an 
old lady out in Oshkosh and that he must always have 
her in mind and be careful to write nothing that would 
not be clear to her. It evidently makes a difference 
whether one writes in the ideal presence of the masters 
or in that of the old lady in Oshkosh. 

Plainly the humanitarian fallacy threatens to subvert 
utterly our critical standard, based as this standard is on 
the judgment of the keen-sighted few in the present sup- 
ported by the judgment of the keen-sighted few in the 
past as embodied in the catena aurea of tradition. We also 
have to face the fact that Emerson, who has emphasized 



CONCLUSION 355 

more happily perhaps than any other recent writer the 
need of selectiveness in the individual (as, for example, 
in his poem " Days "), and also the wisdom of the selec- 
tions embodied in tradition, nevertheless gave undue en- 
couragement to the ordinary man, to the man who is 
undisciplined and unselective and untraditional. His 
influence has in important respects been undeniably 
dubious. "Almost all the ' perky ' people one knows," 
says Mr. Brownell, " are Emersonians." If we are to 
avoid misunderstandings we need to inquire carefully 
into the nature of this " perkiness," and point out why 
it is possible to cherish Emerson, or at least one side of 
Emerson, and at the same time look with extreme sus- 
picion on the Emersonians. 

In an earlier chapter I insisted on various resem- 
blances between Joubert and Emerson, and in the same 
chapter contrasted Joubert and Madame de Stael as 
clear-cut types respectively of the Platonic and Rous- 
seauistic enthusiast. The question arises whether Emer- 
son is, like Joubert, purely Platonic in his enthusiasm. 
Many of his admirers would not hesitate to answer 
affirmatively. A whole book has in fact recently been 
written to prove that Emerson derives almost entirely 
from Plato. 1 On the other hand, another writer declares 
that Emerson is the most creditable disciple Rousseau 
ever had. 2 As a matter of fact, if many of Emerson's 
sayings have their counterpart in Joubert, even more 
of these sayings, perhaps, run parallel to Rousseau. 

1 See J. S. Harrison : The Teachers of Emerson. 

2 See Rousseau, by Thomas Davidson, 231. 



356 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Without attempting to impose our formulae too pedant- 
ically upon Emerson, we may say that we find coexist- 
ing in him the psychological traits that exist separately in 
Joubert and in Rousseau (as well as in Rousseau's dis- 
ciple, Madame de Stael) ; a blend so curious as to make 
of Emerson one of the figures in literature most difficult 
to place. 

An obvious point of contact between Emerson and 
Rousseau is the doctrine of self-reliance, which is ex- 
pounded in so many passages of the " Emile " and is 
generally recognized as the central doctrine of Emer- 
son. But what does Emerson mean by the self in his 
self-reliance ? In his own words, " what is the aboriginal 
self on which a universal reliance may be grounded ? " 
And he goes on to reply that it is " that source at once 
the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life which we 
call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary 
wisdom as Intuition," etc. The derivation of this theory 
of spontaneity from Rousseau through various German 
and New England channels is sufficiently plain. But 
does Emerson, like Rousseau, use the word " spon- 
taneity " and similar terms to connote a pure process of 
expansion, a triumph of impulse over outer barriers 
and restraints? Does he above all employ the word 
" intuition " Rousseauistically or Platonically ? At this 
point appears that strange mingling of elements in his 
genius of which I have spoken. He plainly has the 
Platonic perception of unity with the elevation and 
serenity that go with it. At the same time he exalts 
and puts on the same level with this perception the 



CONCLUSION 357 

purely centrifugal powers of personality. He quotes 
approvingly the Oriental definition of God as the inner 
check (a definition that would never have occurred to 
Rousseau), and almost in the same breath he speaks of 
" divine expansion." Instinct is equally honored with 
intuition and often identified with it. One wonders at 
times why a human nature whose expansive instincts 
are so divine needs any inner check, why a God thus 
defined might not safely be reduced to the role of the 
gods of Epicurus. Is there not some principle of per- 
versity in the human heart that leads in an entirely dif- 
ferent direction from the Self on which we may rely, 
and which it is the business of this Self to discipline 
and subdue ? " The entertainment of the proposition of 
depravity/' replies Emerson, " is the last profligacy and 
profanation." 

Emerson is thus at one with Rousseau in denying in- 
trinsic evil in human nature. His main weakness, as it 
seems to me, from which all his other weaknesses derive, 
is that, like Wordsworth and so many other Rousseau- 
ists, he thus " averts his ken from half of human fate." * 
This attitude towards the problem of perversity is so 
contrary to the ascertained facts, so opposed to all hard 
and clear and honest thinking, that it may compromise 
gravely in the long run the reputations of all those who 
have taken it. A curious reflection occurs at this point. 
The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, probably the most 
original thinker America produced before Emerson, has 

1 This central weakness in Emerson and its consequences have been 
pointed out by Madame Dugard in her monograph, and by P. E. More 
in Shelburne Essays, I, 71 ff. 



358 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

been gravely compromised by precisely the opposite ex- 
cess in dealing with the problem of perversity. Histori- 
cally Emerson's denial of perversity merely marks the 
extreme recoil from the Enfield Discourse on " Sinners 
in the Hands of an Angry God/' — from Edwards's use 
of perversity to establish a spiritual reign of terror which 
was to serve in turn to prop and buttress a tottering 
theology. Edwards, however, in his dealings with sin 
and its reality is only exaggerating the facts, exagger- 
ating them it must be granted with an almost maniacal 
insistency, whereas Emerson and the Rousseauists are 
simply repudiating the facts. Possibly that is one reason 
for the contrast between the tremendous logical grip of 
Edwards and the dialectical feebleness of Emerson. 

It is doubtful whether any one who is so weak in di- 
alectic as Emerson may properly be called a Platonist at 
all. We can imagine how Socrates would have pursued 
Emerson in one of Plato's dialogues, exacting from him 
sharp and discriminating definitions and multiplying 
distinctions about words like u nature " and " instinct," 
which Emerson, as it is, employs so vaguely. He is not 
merely deficient in the more obvious technique of think- 
ing, a deficiency that has led many of the professional 
philosophers to refuse him recognition entirely, but he 
lacks that more essential consistency which would have 
enabled him to knit together the two main aspects of 
his work — on the one hand, the insistence on the unique 
and the individual which he possessed in common with 
his century, and on the other, the spiritual concentra- 
tion and perception of unity which he possessed in com- 



CONCLUSION 359 

mon with the seers of all centuries. A serious thinker 
should not, according to Joubert, put forth a truth with- 
out at the same time putting forth the counter-truth 
that corrects and conditions it; otherwise the truth will 
cease to be wholesome and become an intoxicant. Now 
Emerson, as a rule, supplies both the truth and the 
counter-truth, but the two not being linked together by 
vital dialectic, as they would ordinarily be by a thinker of 
his class, it has been possible for his followers to take 
the intoxicant and leave the corrective. An " ideal" one 
might suppose that carries with it no discipline or obli- 
gation is not worth a straw, but it has been possible to 
extract from Emerson something that passes for ideal- 
ism and is not disciplinary at all, but merely a vague op- 
timistic exaltation. Instead of seeking to ascertain the 
laws of nature and human nature and then striving to 
adjust ourselves to them, we are filled under Emerson's 
influence and in his own phrase with " the delicious sense 
of indeterminate size " and become a elastic as the gas 
of gunpowder." We are, in short, encouraged to be- 
lieve that the stern realities of sin and suffering may be 
charmed away by a sort of emotional intoxication. This 
side of Emerson is plainly related on the one hand to 
Rousseau, and on the other to that most dubious aspect 
of our American national temper which finds its extreme 
expression in Christian Science. " Man is good and na- 
ture is beautiful," says Rousseau in substance. " I am 
lovely and the world is lovely, too," is a recent formu- 
lation of the creed of the Christian Scientist. 

This Rousseauistic side of Emerson not only obscures 



360 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the struggle between good and evil in the individual, it 
also obscures the need of culture, the aid the individual 
may derive in solving his problems from society and, in 
general, from the experience of other men both in the 
present and in the past. If the times suffer from squalid 
mediocrity, as Emerson assures us they do, the difficulty 
must be that the individual does not show sufficient con- 
fidence in opposing to this mediocrity his own infallible 
intuitions. Emerson never tires of insisting on the hor- 
rors of conformity. As manifested in the English Church, 
for example, it " glazes the eye, bloats the flesh, and 
gives the voice a stertorous clang.' ' A certain type of 
Emersonian suggests to us rather the horrors of non- 
conformity. The examples are only too numerous of 
persons who in exclusive reliance on the inner oracle 
have thought themselves inspired when they were only 
peculiar. In the end, it is true, a man must walk by his 
own light, but one would never gather from Emerson 
how terribly difficult it is to make sure first that this 
light is not darkness. In his essay on " Quotation and 
Originality " Emerson dilates on how little the individ- 
ual amounts to after all, and how the best he can do is 
to quote and imitate ; and the individual is in a fair way 
to become humble and conscious of the danger, as Burke 
would put it, of trading on his own private capital of 
wit. But then Emerson adds, "to all that can be said of 
the preponderance of the Past the simple word Genius 
is a sufficient reply. . . . Genius believes its faintest 
presentiment against the testimony of all history." At 
this reassuring utterance the individual is in a fair way 



CONCLUSION 361 

to lose his incipient humility and become once more as 
elastic as the gas of gunpowder. With such an inner 
oracle to rely on, why go through the severe effort of 
building up standards based on the assimilation of tra- 
dition ? 

Pascal would have said that Emerson's sense of man's 
grandeur was not sufficiently tempered by a sense of 
man's wretchedness. " The single man/' according to 
Emerson, must " plant himself indomitably upon his in- 
stincts." A Chicago physician recently declared that the 
average man has the murder " instinct " ; and if we are 
to trust statistics an increasing number of Americans 
are planting themselves upon it very indomitably. I am 
not trying, however, to establish a connection between 
Emersonianism and murder. The worst that is likely to 
befall the man who plants himself indomitably upon his 
own instincts is that he will plant himself indomitably 
upon his own crudity. " The affirmative principle of the 
recent philosophy," Emerson declares, " is trust in the 
private, self-supplied powers of the individual." " As 
though," says Goethe, who had seen the beginnings of 
the philosophy to which Emerson refers, the philosophy 
of original genius, and had almost been the victim of it, 
" as though a man gets anything from himself except 
his own awkwardness and stupidity." 

Emerson, then, is a wise man whose influence often 
works against that humility which is the first mark of 
wisdom ; a true sage who must yet be numbered among 
the sycophants of human nature ; a somewhat baffling 
blend, as I have already said, of Rousseauism and insight ; 



362 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

impressing us at times as a truly religious spirit, a spirit 
living, as a theologian would say, in a state of grace, 
and at times reminding us only too strongly of that 
Rousseauistic caricature of the religious spirit, the " beau- 
tiful soul." But light, as Arnold remarks, is rare and 
must be treasured wherever found : we must, therefore, 
treasure it in Emerson, though often associated with an 
impossible optimism, just as we must treasure it in Jona- 
than Edwards, though associated with an impossible 
theology. The oversoul that Emerson perceives in his 
best moments is the true oversoul and not the undersoul 
that the Rousseauist sets up as a substitute. He can 
therefore supply elements that will help us in forming 
our critical standard. I have tried, however, to make 
clear that our use of these elements, if it is not to be 
misleading, must be hedged about with the sharp dis- 
tinctions of which he was himself so sparing. 

m 

What we are seeking is a critic who rests his dis- 
cipline and selection upon the past without being a 
mere traditionalist ; whose holding of tradition involves 
a constant process of hard and clear thinking, a con- 
stant adjustment, in other words, of the experience of 
the past to the changing needs of the present. 

Who are to be our models for this right critical in- 
terpretation of the past? They are curiously hard to 
find in the nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that 
it is commonly supposed to be the most historical of 
centuries. There prevailed during this period two main 



CONCLUSION 363 

attitudes towards the past which may be defined, re- 
spectively, as the scientific and the romantic. The man 
with the scientific attitude is chiefly concerned with 
investigating and establishing the facts of the past. 
The romanticist, for his part, revels in the mere pictur- 
esqueness of the facts or else takes refuge in the past 
from the present, uses it, as Taine would say, to create 
for himself an alibi. But the past should be regarded 
primarily neither as a laboratory for research nor as a 
bower of dreams, but as a school of experience. Where, 
then, is the man who has been fully initiated into tra- 
dition, and at the same time knows how to bring it to 
bear upon the present ? Even Sainte-Beuve does not 
fully satisfy us here. He was one of the victims of that 
naturalistic fatalism that has lain like a blight upon the 
human spirit for the past fifty years or more. " Man," 
he says, "has the illusion of liberty." What is the use 
of knowing the past if one is not free to profit by the 
knowledge ? We think by contrast of Goethe (whom 
Sainte-Beuve himself calls the king of critics), and of 
Goethe's saying that the chief benefit one may derive 
from a total study of his work is a " certain inner 
freedom." 

Goethe, indeed, comes nearer than any other modern 
to what we are seeking ; not the romantic or scientific 
Goethe, it should be added, but the humanistic Goethe, 
who is revealed in the conversations with Eckermann 
and others, and in the critical utterances of his later 
years. As an actual practitioner of the art of criticism, 
he seems to me inferior to the best of the Frenchmen ; 



364 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

but as an initiator into the critical habit of mind he is 
incomparable. He has, as Sainte-Beuve puts it, assim- 
ilated not merely tradition, but all traditions, and that 
without ceasing to be a modern of moderns ; he keeps 
watch for every new sail on the horizon, but from the 
height of a Sunium. He would use the larger back- 
ground and perspective to round out and support his 
individual insight and so make of the present what it 
should be — not the servile imitation, nor again the 
blank denial of the past, but its creative continuation. 
" To the errors and aberrations of the hour," he says, 
" we must oppose the masses of universal history." He 
would have us cease theorizing about the absolute and 
learn to recognize it in its actual manifestations. This 
particular form of the humanistic art of seeing the One 
in the Many would seem especially appropriate to an age 
like ours that differs above all from other ages, Greek 
and Roman antiquity, for example, in having at its com- 
mand a vaster body of verified human experience. 

I have said that the humanistic rather than the Rous- 
seauistic Goethe is important for our purpose. But 
I should add that the process by which he passes 
from the Rousseauistic to the humanistic attitude is 
almost as instructive as the final result. The complete- 
ness of his reaction from the Rousseauistic theory of 
spontaneity or original genius, of which he was at the 
beginning the chief German exponent, may be inferred 
from a sentence I have already quoted. He did not go 
on, like Emerson, cultivating the delicious sense of inde- 
terminate size, and feeling as elastic as the gas of gun- 



CONCLUSION 365 

powder ; he was not permanently satisfied, in short, with 
romantic megalomania ; he discovered that man pro- 
gresses by taking on limitations and not, as the Rous- 
seauist would have us believe, by throwing them off. 
The lesson of " Wilhelm Meister," as of so much of his 
later writing, is that the individual must submit his 
temperament and impulses to something higher than 
themselves — in other words, he must renounce. The 
process of constant dying to one's self, that Goethe 
proclaims (stirb und werde), falls in, of course, with 
much that is most profound in religion ; but Goethe's 
renunciation, it should be observed, is entirely unascetic. 
It seems the natural outgrowth of the experience of this 
life and not, as so often in religion, the violent contra- 
diction of it. 

What Goethe himself renounced was the world of 
Rousseauistic revery. He turned more and more from 
dreaming to doing. A man must, he says, combining 
the terminology of Leibnitz with that of Aristotle, raise 
himself by constant striving from a mere monad to an 
entelechy. Only in this way may he hope for happiness 
in this world and continuance in the next. We may take, 
as best summing up the central thought of Goethe, the 
lines at the end of the Second Faust in which the angels 
proclaim salvation by works : — 

" Wer immer strebend sich bemtiht, 
Den kOnnen wir erlOsen." 

Yet it is just here in connection with this doctrine 
of works, especially as exemplified in the Second Faust, 
that our first doubts about Goethe arise. I have quoted 



366 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Goethe against Emerson. It is only fair to quote Emer- 
son in return upon the limitations of Goethe. After 
praising Goethe heartily in his " Representative Men," 
he yet ends by saying that he did not worship the highest 
unity. So far as this judgment merely reflects the Rous- 
seauistic side of Emerson, his suspicion of culture and 
his dislike of analysis, it is negligible. But Emerson was 
not only a Rousseauist but a seer, and his insight as 
well as his Rousseauism appears, as it seems to me, in 
the dictum that Goethe did not worship the highest 
unity. 

Now to say of Goethe that he did not worship the" 
highest unity is simply another way of saying that he 
lacked religious elevation. In any case he is less open 
than most men of the last century to the charge of con- 
fusing the planes of being. He kept his outlook open 
and unobstructed by scientific or other dogmatism even 
on the religious plane. He purged and purified himself 
very completely of the pseudo-spirituality of the Rous- 
seauist, — of that shrinking back from outer reality 
coupled with that giddy gazing into the bottomless pit 
of the "heart" against which he utters a warning in 
his " Tasso." * He escaped in short from the world of 
romantic dreaming that is within us. We have it, how- 
ever, on rather high authority that the kingdom of heaven 
is also within. Even in the inner life itself, it would ap- 

1 " Es liegt una uns herum 
Gar mancher Abgrund, den das Schicksal grub ; 
Doch hier in unserm Herzen ist der tiefste, 
Und reizend ist es, sich hinab zu sttirzen." 



CONCLUSION 367 

pear, there may be a choice of direction, a parting of the 
ways. Goethe would not have hesitated to reply that he 
had aimed to escape, not only from the romantic, but also 
from the Christian morbidness. I have quoted Sainte- 
Beuve's saying that Goethe had assimilated, not merely 
tradition, but all traditions. How about the tradition that 
goes back to Judaea ? The reply is by no means simple. 
We remember the impressive tribute he paid to Christ- 
ianity 1 only a few weeks before his death, but then he 
also retained his early conviction that Pascal had done 
more harm to religion than all the deists and atheists 
of the eighteenth century. Now Pascal paints, though 
in somewhat less lurid hues, the same picture of human 
destiny as Jonathan Edwards : on the one hand, God in 
his absolute and arbitrary sovereignty ; on the other, 
man weltering helplessly in his sin ; the interval between 
only to be traversed by " thunderclaps and visible upsets 
of grace." This somewhat melodramatic form of Christ- 
ianity, the tremendous spiritual romanticism of Saint 
Augustine, was undoubtedly distasteful to Goethe. As 
against this type of inwardness with its ascetic impli- 
cations, he was for reconciling the flesh and the spirit, 
or as his detractors would say, for becoming a pagan. 
He had at least the advantage of being in accord in his 
attitude towards Augustinian Christianity with the main 
trend of the modern spirit. It would take almost unim- 
aginable disasters to induce the world to give up its 

1 Conversation with Eckerraann, 11 March, 1832. For the more im- 
portant passages bearing on Goethe's religious opinions see Otto Harnack : 

Goethe in der Epoche seiner Vollendung^ 50-90. 



368 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

hard-won reconciliation of flesh and spirit, and once 
more go into sackcloth and ashes. 

Goethe was, however, too great to deny entirely the 
truths of grace, or to lack the sense of man's helplessness 
in the hands of a higher power. He was capable of the 
obeisance of the spirit before this power and knew that 
if a man is not to remain a mere Titan his works must 
receive its blessing. 1 Yet he would have man dwell on 
works and the feasibility of works, and not on what is 
at bottom an insoluble mystery. No inconsiderable part 
of wisdom consists in just this : not to allow the mind 
to dwell on questions that are unprofitable in themselves 
or else entirely beyond its grasp. 

I may myself seem to be straying at present into re- 
gions rather remote from my topic and therefore unpro- 
fitable. My reply is that the chief problem of criticism, 
namely, the search for standards to oppose to individual 
caprice, is also the chief problem of contemporary 
thought in general : so that any solution which does not 
get back to first principles will be worthless. If in a 
book on French criticism, again, I am devoting so much 
space to Emerson and Goethe, my purpose is to empha- 
size in this way my belief that this problem of discipline 
and standards is not to be solved in terms of French 
life alone, as a whole school of contemporary French 
thinkers 2 incline to believe, but is international. Finally, 

1 " Gross beginnet Ihr Titanen, aber leiten 
Zu dem ewig Guten, ewig Schonen, 
1st der Gotter Werk ; die lasst gewabren ! — " 
2 The so-called nationalists — Paul Bourget, Maurice Barres, Charles 
Maurras, etc. 



CONCLUSION 369 

if my discussion of grace and good works seems to some 
to have an old-fashioned flavor, I would reply with 
Sainte-Beuve that simple psychological analysis when 
carried to a certain point encounters in other terms the 
same questions as theology. Both in a man's native 
gift as well as in the use of this gift to some adequate 
end there is an element of grace. In enumerating the 
various explanations of this mystery that have been 
attempted, Sainte-Beuve neglected, as I pointed out, the 
very interesting explanation embodied in the Oriental 
doctrine of karma. According to karma all that large 
part of a man's life which is so plainly independent of 
his own will and works is simply the result of his pre- 
vious works. This doctrine must affect its devotees very 
differently from Augustinian Christianity, substituting 
as it does a strict causal nexus for the somewhat melo- 
dramatic intervention of a divine bon plaisir. Yet it 
only puts the difficulty a few steps farther back; the 
doctrine itself, along with the belief in reincarnation 
it implies, is just as unthinkable from the platform of 
the ordinary intellect as the doctrine of grace. We have 
the testimony of Buddha, the chief exponent of karma, 
on this very point. He puts it down in his list of the 
four " unthinkables." 1 In him who tries to grasp the 
workings of this law 2 directly, he says, grievous and 
vexatious mental habits will arise, which may even end 
in madness. The faith in karma is to remain in solu- 
tion, as it were, in the background of our consciousness 

1 See Ahguttara Nikdya, Part n, sect. 77. 
8 The Pali word is " kammavipako." 



370 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

and from there to irradiate our action. Our actual atten- 
tion should be fixed on the step in the "path" that is 
just ahead of us. We can infer what Buddha would 
have thought of the Augustinian 1 Christians who 
would have man turn away from works and brood ever- 
lastingly on the mystery of grace. He would have agreed 
with Holmes that the only decent thing for a consistent 
Calvinist to do is to go mad. 

Goethe, then, to return to him, may simply have 
showed his supreme good sense, his instinct for a sound 
spiritual hygiene, in turning away from grace to works. 
He established his own list of " unthinkables," which 
is not so different from that of Buddha as one might 
suppose. We may note, for example, that both men dis- 
missed as unprofitable speculations about personal im- 
mortality. 2 How many other questions there are that 
professional philosophers are fond of discussing and that 
may be profitably dismissed either because they are in- 
soluble in themselves or because they do not, in Buddha's 
phrase, "make for edification " ! Men do not fail, Goethe 
insisted, so much from lack of light on ultimate problems 
as from neglect of the very obvious and often very 
humble duty which is immediately before them ; from not 
having met, as he puts it, the demands of the day (die 
Forderung des Tages). In thus looking to immediate 
practice Goethe is at one with Dr. Johnson, the fit 

1 I do not mean to say that St. Augustine did not put great emphasis 
on works, but merely that the side of Christianity which shows most clearly 
his influence has put an even greater emphasis on grace. 

2 For Goethe's admirable utterances on this subject see Eckermann, 
24 February, 1824. 



CONCLUSION 371 

representative of a race that has shown a genius for 
conduct. All theory, says Johnson, makes against the 
freedom of the will and all experience in favor of it — 
the happiest utterance on this subject with which I am 
familiar. Like Goethe, Johnson simply refused, therefore, 
at the outset to enter into the metaphysical maze of 
either the dogmatic supernaturalist or the dogmatic 
naturalist. For the method of approach to the problem 
of a dogmatic naturalist like Taine involves, no less 
than that of the dogmatic supernaturalist, an attempt to 
think the unthinkable (as Buddha also pointed out). 1 
Both the One and the Many as well as man's relation 
to them must forever elude final formulation. 

Why, then, should we feel any doubt about Goethe's 
doctrine of work ? The reply is that in his reaction 
from the romantic morbidness and what seemed to him 
the Christian morbidness he has transferred his work 
too much from the inner life of the individual to the 
outer world. This point may be made clear by com- 
paring him with the great ancient of whom he is in 
some respects the disciple — Aristotle. For no one I 
presume, would deny that Goethe is in his general 
temper far more Aristotelian than Platonic. Now if 
Plato anticipates on one side of his thinking the doc- 
trine of grace, as when he says that virtue is "neither 
natural nor acquired but comes to the virtuous by the 
gift of God" ("Meno"), Aristotle goes steadily on 

1 In the passage I have already quoted. The Pali word for the attempt 
to grasp the material world intellectually (which Buddha deems impos- 
sible) is " lokacinta." 



372 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the assumption that virtue can be acquired, and is there- 
fore a thoroughgoing partisan of works. The works 
he would have us perform, however, are not primarily 
utilitarian. He would have us work to redeem our 
own lower self from evil habits, and not, like Faust, 
to reclaim marsh lands from the sea. Moreover, the 
purpose that is imposed on the lower self and by which 
it is disciplined is linked by a series of intermediary 
purposes to the supreme and perfect End itself; in 
other words, it rests ultimately on an intuition of what 
Emerson calls the highest unity. Aristotle is indeed less 
habitually conscious of this unity than Plato. Though 
even Plato seems terribly " at ease in Zion " to the aus- 
tere Christian, he has more sense of man's helplessness 
before the infinite, more of that humility, in short, that 
the man whose attention is turned too exclusively to 
works is constantly in danger of losing. 

But though Aristotle is less preoccupied with the 
highest unity than Plato, I believe that he is more pre- 
occupied with it than Goethe. Though far more than a 
mere naturalist, as I have tried to show, Goethe, in the 
last analysis, conceives of life more naturalistically, 
that is more expansively, than Aristotle. He was 
born into an enormously expansive age and was drawn 
into its main current. He found in the First Faust 
the happiest formulae for the two main forces that 
were to dominate this age — scientific positivism (Im 
Anfang war die Tat) and Rousseauistic romanticism 
(Gefuhl ist alles). The Aristotelian would object that 
the Deed and the Emotion do not by themselves 



CONCLUSION 373 

suffice, that some adequate purpose must intervene to 
direct the Deed and discipline the Emotion. And 
Goethe himself became increasingly Aristotelian in this 
respect as he grew older. Yet even so, he still con- 
ceives at the end of the Second Faust of both the 
Deed and the Emotion too much in terms of expansion. 
I have already criticised from the Aristotelian point of 
view his conception of the Deed. Let us consider for a 
moment from the same point of view his conception of 
the Emotion. As is well known he praises as the most 
exalted form of emotion the " eternal Feminine " which 
" draws us upward." We are reminded here of Dante 
— a poet who will scarcely be accused of not having 
worshipped the highest unity — and his proclamation 
of that " primal love " that built the walls of hell. 1 
Dante's conception implies a degree of selectiveness 
that makes us shudder. But is it not evident that to 
conceive of the highest love as Goethe did is to go to 
the opposite extreme, and eliminate from it the element 
of judgment and selection entirely ; to forget that if the 
eternal Feminine draws us upward, only the eternal 
Masculine can keep us up ? The supreme love, we may 
surmise, is not exclusively judicial or sympathetic, but 
a vital mediation between judgment and sympathy ; it 
is selective love. It belongs to that superrational plane 
on which, in Goethe's phrase, the indescribable is 



. 2 



i Inf., m, v. 6. 
* " Das Unbeschreibliche, 
Hier ist es gethan." 



374 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

We can now begin to see in what sense Emerson may- 
have been right in saying that Goethe did not worship 
the highest unity. His view of life in the Second Faust 
evidently tends to fly apart into the two extremes with 
which we have been so familiar during the past cen- 
tury — on the one hand, the idea of work conceived 
primarily in a utilitarian spirit, and on the other, diffus- 
ive, unselective sympathy. The supervention of the 
highest unity would have restored the work from the 
outer world to the breast of the individual and made 
the sympathy selective. We should then have had a 
point of view more humanistic and less humanitarian. 
To be sure, Goethe had no easy task in converting the 
mere romantic adventurer of the First Part (der Tin- 
mensch ohne Zweck und Ruh) into a good humanist or 
even into a good humanitarian. If we wish to do full 
justice to Goethe as a humanist we should not therefore 
confine ourselves too strictly to Faust. 

The true humanist, that is the man who is sympathet- 
ically selective, has his standard within him — living, 
flexible, intuitive. Aristotle would make such a man 
the arbiter of all questions of taste and conduct — they 
are to be as he would decide. 1 A man may thus belong 
to the keen-sighted few, Aristotle admits, simply be- 
cause he is born such. 2 In not trying to get behind this 
fact, Aristotle showed his good sense, if to do so would 
have been to run into insoluble mysteries. As the Greek 
poet says, there are three classes of men, (1) those who 

1 The (TirovSaTos is &<r*€p tcavhv Kal fiirpov . Eth. nic, III, 4, 1133 a 33. 

2 He is a ctyvfr. Cf . Eth. Nic., m, 5, 1114 b 6. 



CONCLUSION 375 

have insight, (2) those who, lacking insight themselves, 
have yet the wit to recognize it in others, and (3) 
those who have neither insight nor the wit to recog- 
nize it (and these last, he adds, are the truly useless 
men). The uncomfortable fact about life is that so many 
men belong to the third class, that there are so many 
men whose heads, in Joubert's quaint phrase, have no 
skylights in them. Men may be very eminent in other 
ways and yet lack the skylights ; Taine, it seems to me, 
lacked them. Nor do we escape from the difficulty by 
putting our main emphasis with M. Bergson, not on the 
spiritual but on the aesthetic intuitions. The ordinary 
man can no more by any effort of his own be as aes- 
thetically perceptive as Keats, let us say, than he can 
be as spiritually perceptive as Emerson. The undertak- 
ing in either case is of the same order as that of adding 
a cubit to one's stature. To be completely equipped for 
criticism one should possess in some measure both kinds 
of perceptiveness. 

We must not, however, bear down too heavily, as 
Voltaire does, for example, in matters of taste, on the 
evident element of grace and predestination, for this is 
to neglect the truth of works ; still less must we see the 
measure of all things in the man in the street, for this 
is to neglect the truths of both grace and works ; least 
of all must we, like Tolstoy, seek our literary and artis- 
tic norm in the untutored peasant, for this is to set up 
a sort of inverted grace at the imminent risk of falling 
into bedlam delusion. The right use of grace and similar 
doctrines is to make us humble and not to make us 



376 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

morbid or discouraged. With due distrust of ourselves, 
a distrust that appears in our readiness to fortify our 
insight by tradition, with full admission that our works 
must be irradiated and guided from within and from 
above if they are not to prove vain, we must yet put 
our prime emphasis in literature, as elsewhere, on works. 
Now to perform works in the sense I have tried to de- 
fine, that is, to feel in all one does the control of the 
highest unity, means in practice to select. All the 
knowledge and sympathy in the world can only prepare 
for the supreme, the distinctively human, act of selection. 
We must therefore train ourselves to feel that outer 
objects are, in the phrase of Epictetus, only the raw 
material for selection, and that it is possible to select. 
A great library, for example, is an infinite potentiality 
of selection, ranging from Zola to Plato. In our attitude 
towards it, as in our other concerns, we are to appeal 
from our moods of lazy self-indulgence to our moods 
of strenuous endeavor, from Philip drunk to Philip 
sober. Our reading enters as one element into that sum 
of choices that determines at last our rank in the scale 
of being. Here as elsewhere, if we neglect the oppor- 
tunities that the " hypocritic Days " bring with them 
as they pass in their endless file, we shall "too late 
under their solemn fillets see the scorn." 

v We must select constantly and resolutely, though 
without sourness or asceticism. The romanticists have 
been busy for a century or more instilling into our 
heads the notion that to be selective is to be narrow 
and probably ill-natured. We must not select but ad- 



CONCLUSION 377 

mire — admire like a brute, Hugo would add. When 
Gautier averred that if he thought even one of Hugo's 
verses bad, he would not confess the fact to himself at 
midnight in a dark cellar without a candle, he must 
have come near fulfilling the master's ideal. Many 
authors would no doubt like to see criticism reduced, 
as a romantic dilettante recently defined it, to the " art 
of praise." A cat may, however, according to the adage, 
be killed with cream ; and it has become only too evident 
that criticism may be killed by an excess of the appreci- 
ative temper. The true mark of barbarism, according 
to Goethe, is to have no organ for discerning the excel- 
lent. One may show that he lacks this organ just as 
surely by overpraising as by overblaming. What we 
see in America to-day, for instance, is an endless pro- 
cession of bad or mediocre books, each one saluted on 
its way to oblivion by epithets that would be deserved 
only by a masterpiece. We have, in fact, been having 
so many masterpieces of late that we have almost ceased 
to have any literature. The critic is anxious like every- 
body else to show that he is overflowing with the milk 
of human kindness, that he is, in short, a " beautiful 
soul." Moreover, in a country where the belief is held 
that all things will turn out fortunately if only we feel 
lovely enough about them, it is commercially profitable 
to have a beautiful soul. The Christian Scientists, in- 
deed, may be said to have put the art of feeling lovely 
on a dividend-paying basis. On the other hand, the 
man who has too many exclusions and disapprovals will 
fall under the suspicion of not being an optimist, and 



378 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

not to pass as an optimist is in many parts of America 
to be discredited. It is of course better to be a eupeptic 
than a merely dyspeptic critic. From this point of view 
we are better off than New Zealand if we are to believe 
a recent New Zealand writer, who, after comparing 
American critics to a " community of monthly nurses 
cooing and cackling over a succession of incomparable 
literary births/' says that in New Zealand the compar- 
ison suggested is that of a " pack of incorrigible ter- 
riers watching for so many rats or rabbits to leave their 
holes." But it is not a question of being either eupep- 
tic or dyspeptic, but of having standards and the cour- 
age to apply them. One may, as I have tried to show in 
the case of Joubert, be perfectly genial and good- 
natured, and at the same time extremely severe and 
selective. 

The excess of the sympathetic and appreciative tem- 
per is of course nothing peculiar to America. As a 
matter of fact, Max Nordau cites certain German critics 
as the worst examples of the disease he calls superlativ- 
ism, by which he means the facile outpour of epithets 
pushed to the verge of hysteria. Modern criticism, in 
getting rid of formalism and in becoming comprehen- 
sive and sympathetic, has performed only half, and that 
the less difficult half, of its task. The time would seem 
especially ripe for taking up the second half of the 
task — that of finding some new principle of judgment 
and selection. Renan says that " Goethe embraced the 
universe in the vast affirmation of love," 1 — which is 

1 Avenir de la science, 448. 






CONCLUSION 379 

a somewhat hyperbolical way of saying that he is the 
worthy representative of a great era of expansion. But 
if Goethe were alive to-day, he might be less concerned 
with embracing the universe and more concerned with 
maintaining standards against the nightmare of an un- 
selective democracy. We need not, again, admire Sainte- 
Beuve the less because we cannot admit, any more than 
in the case of Goethe, that the total emphasis of his 
criticism is just what we need at present. The genre in 
his hands, as I have tried to show, is expanding away 
from its centre. What seems desirable to-day is rather 
a movement that shall work in from the periphery of 
criticism in knowledge and sympathy to its heart and 
core in judgment. How peripheral criticism became 
during the nineteenth century may be inferred from 
the fact that Renan, for example, uses the word in a 
sense that is contrary to its very etymology. 

What is most needed just now is not great doctors 
of relativity like Renan and Sainte-Beuve, but rather a 
critic who, without being at all rigid or reactionary, can 
yet carry into his work the sense of standards that are 
set above individual caprice and the flux of phenomena ; 
who can, in short, oppose a genuine humanism to the 
pseudo-humanism of the pragmatists. A critic of this 
kind might be counted on to proclaim a philosophy, not 
of vital impulse, like M. Bergson, but of vital unity and 
vital restraint — restraint felt as an inner living law and 
not merely as a dead and mechanical outer rule. We 
may venture the paradox that criticism would derive less 
benefit at present from another Sainte-Beuve than from 



380 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

a second Boileau, that is, from a man who should work 
as effectively for the right kind of concentration in our 
own day as Boileau did in the seventeenth century. No 
sensible person would deny the narrowness of Boileau's 
range 1 or defend the formalism that appears so often 
in his theory. But his greatness, as Sainte-Beuve him- 
self points out, lies elsewhere — in the native tact and 
almost infallible intuition he showed in his critical judg- 
ments. 2 All was not veto and restriction in his role, 
Sainte-Beuve goes on to say, yet the restrictive element 
predominated. A modern Boileau, if he were to be ef- 
fective, would have to take up in himself the main results 
of the great expansion of the last century, but he would 
be primarily concerned, not with embracing the universe 
in the vast affirmation of love, but with making keen and 
crisp discriminations between different degrees of merit 
or demerit. He would also feel in his own way that 
hatred with which Boileau said he had been inspired from 
the age of fifteen — the hatred of a stupid book ; and he 
would not lack material on which to exercise it. In other 
words, the age offers an opening for satire ; but it must 
be constructive satire, satire that implies standards and 
is " purified," as Boileau claims of his own, " by a ray 
of good sense." Nothing could be more inspiriting than 
some twentieth-century equivalent for those first satires 3 

1 Sainte-Beuve enumerates Boileau's limitations in N. Lundis, I, 300-02. 

2 See the important passage on the nature and r61e of the critic Cha- 
teaubriand, n, 114 ff. 

8 Especially the ninth satire which has been termed " a martyrology of 
bad books and bad authors," and which M. Lanson calls a " terrible and 
admirable slaughter of reputations." 



CONCLUSION 381 

of Boileau when the bad authors went down before his 
epigrams like the suitors before the shafts of Odysseus. 

IV 

What likelihood is there that we shall witness in con- 
temporary France the rise of a selective and humanistic 
criticism of the kind I have just been trying to define? 
Any answer to this question must of course be pro- 
visional. Perhaps the most interesting development of 
recent years in criticism proper is the anti-romantic 
movement which has found notable expression in the 
volume of Lasserre. 1 This movement is open to some 
of the objections I have brought against Brunetiere, 
whose influence is, indeed, very visible in it. A reaction 
against naturalism must take up into itself all that is 
legitimate in naturalism, after the fashion of Aristotle, 
and Goethe at his best. Though drawing vital nutri- 
ment from tradition, it must not dream of an impossible 
return to the past. It must not, in short, be reactionary 
in the French sense. The Frenchman has a way, partly 
as a result of his logical stringency, of connecting the 
literary problem with the religious problem and then 
running the religious problem in turn into the political 
problem. That is why, let me repeat, I have been dis- 
cussing the literary problem in this chapter in terms of 
Emerson and Goethe. I could scarcely have avoided 
certain misunderstandings if I had discussed it in terms 
of some Frenchman (let us say, Joubert). The day much 
to be desired will doubtless come when it will dawn on 

1 Le Romantisme frangais, 1907. 



382 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the ordinary Frenchman that from the fact that a man 
is not a Jacobin, it does not follow that he must be a 
Jesuit, and that one may cease to be a clerical without 
therefore becoming an anti-clerical. This day, however, 
has not yet arrived, though there are signs that it is on 
the way. It may turn out that if France is to maintain 
her high place in civilization she will have to expel both 
the Jesuitical and the Jacobinical virus from her blood. 
Another important French movement of to-day bear- 
ing directly on the question of critical standards is that 
in philosophy. M. Bergson is, of course, the most prom- 
inent internationally of the many representatives of this 
movement. If the main drift of the movement is to 
undermine scientific dogmatism, great confusion pre- 
vails as yet as to what is to be built on its ruins. I have 
made sufficiently clear in this volume my own belief 
that the philosophy of M. Bergson, whatever its merits 
as an attack on scholastic science, is on its constructive 
side not humanistic, but at most pseudo-humanistic. It 
is a late birth of romanticism, allied with all that is 
violent and extreme in contemporary life from syndical- 
ism to " futurist " painting. M. Bergson's appeal to "in- 
tuition" in particular has been hailed with delight by 
romantic dilettantes the world over. It has confirmed 
them in their existing belief that they do not need to 
justify rationally their random impressions, that they 
may go on indefinitely luxuriating in a decadent aesthet- 
icism. The " Revue des Deux Mondes " suggests that 
M. Bergson may be a new Socrates. It is far more evi- 
dent that he is a new Protagoras. His influence is mak- 



CONCLUSION 383 

ing against the establishing of standards of judgment 
to-day just as the influence of Protagoras and the other 
sophists made against Socrates and his efforts to main- 
tain rational standards in ancient Greece. Any attempt 
to base judgment on the flux is about as promising an 
undertaking as to seek to found a firm edifice on the 
waves of the sea. 1 

Finally if we are to understand the situation in France 
from the point of view of the present topic we must cast 
a glance at contemporary education. What is most ob- 
vious here is that for a number of years (especially 
since the " reform " of secondary education in 1902), a 
humanitarian reaction has been in progress against hu- 
manism. This French humanitarian movement, like all 
movements of the kind, breaks up when analyzed into 
two main aspects : first, the worship of the sovereignty 
of the Fact (Im Anfang war die Tat), the refusal to 
impose upon education other than utilitarian ends ; sec- 
ondly, the cult of diffusive unselective sympathy. Hand 
in hand with the undermining of the humanities in favor 
of scientific and utilitarian subjects in the lycee, has 
gone the exaltation of philological over literary schol- 
arship at the Sor bonne. The old French education, it is 
asserted, gave too much encouragement to empty rhe- 
toric ; and we must recognize an element of truth in this 

1 Some of the most poisonous forms of impressionism are found among 
certain contemporary sociologists. It is easy to detect under the scientific 
or pseudo-scientific terminology the original Jacobinical assumption that 
mere impulse becomes august when multiplied by a million or by ten 
million. For instance, a prominent French sociologist claims that the 
Athenian jury was justified in condemning Socrates to death, being sup- 
ported as it was by the " social conscience " of the time, 



384 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

contention. For the humanism against which the French 
have been reacting is not humanism as it might be, 
but humanism as it was established in the lycee after 
the Revolution and under the patronage of Napoleon, a 
humanism that derives largely in turn from the some- 
what formalistic scheme of education worked out by the 
Jesuits. 

Perhaps the leader of the new movement at the 
Sorbonne has been M. Gustave Lanson. The admirable 
qualities of his " History of French Literature " should 
not blind us to the fact that he is a humanitarian rather 
than a humanist. He is especially unsound, it seems to 
me, in his solution of the infinitely delicate and im- 
portant problem as to the right relationship between 
literature and science. He clings at present even more 
desperately to the Fact than he did at the beginning, he 
is even more convinced that to impose a human purpose 
on the Fact is either to become a reactionary or to be lost 
in the vaguely subjective. We may apply Sainte-Beuve's 
method to M. Lanson and study him in his disciples. 
We see dissertations issuing from the laboratory he has 
established at the Sorbonne which are immensely honest 
and thorough, but lacking in those finer qualities of 
selection and arrangement that have distinguished the 
best French scholarship in the past. This unselective 
worship of facts in literary study is what the French call 
la jichomanie. 

In the meanwhile a lively counter-movement is begin- 
ning to declare itself, directed against both the " re- 
form " of 1902 and the undue philologizing of the New 



CONCLUSION 385 

Sorbonne. 1 To those who have accused him of dehu- 
manizing literary study, M. Lanson has replied with 
some acrimony 2 that they are only belletristic dabblers. 
We have had our own debates in America between the 
philologists and the humanists (or those who imagine 
themselves such), but the acrimony has been less. This 
is partly because we do not take ideas so seriously as the 
French (and herein we are their inferiors), partly be- 
cause we do not mix the question up in their fashion 
with religion and politics (and herein we are their 
superiors). A man may set up as a humanist in this 
country without falling under any suspicion of being 
a Jesuit or a partisan of monarchical government. I 
should add that beside the more theoretical opposition 
to the new education there has been visible of late a 
sort of insurrection of common sense against it, 3 and 
the leaders of this latter movement are making a laud- 
able effort to keep it clear of religion and politics : it is 
much as if the so-called " Amherst idea " in this country 
should spread and assume a national significance. 

1 The most brilliant of the recent attacks on the Sorbonne is that by 
Agathon in L' 'Esprit de la Nauvelle Sorbonne (3e ed., 1911 ; originally 
published as articles in L' Opinion, 1910). The book must be used with 
some caution. "Agathon " is the pen-name of two very young men who 
have, I understand, certain personal reasons for their animus. See also 
P. Leguay, La Sorbonne (2 e ed., 1910). 

2 See for example his reply to M. Ch. Salomon in Revue du Mois, 
April, 1911. 

3 The " Ligue pour la Culture Franchise " was organized in 1911, and 
counts in its membership a majority of the different sections of the In- 
stitute (including the Academy). Interesting information as to the 
progress of the movement will be found in the Bulletin of the H League " 
(No. 1, December, 1911). 



386 MODEKN FRENCH CRITICISM 

An insurrection of common sense is a good thing so 
far as it goes, but I do not believe that by itself it will 
prove sufficient. An effective revival of the humanities 
will have to" rest on sound philosophical foundations, 
and these foundations do not at present exist. The 
points at issue between the New Sorbonne and its op- 
ponents are singularly complex and cannot be disposed 
of by labelling one side literary and the other scientific 
or philological. We are really helped very little in get- 
ting at a man's ultimate position by being told that he 
is " literary." The ancient sophists were also " literary," 
in fact they came out much more strongly for literature 
than Socrates. The important thing to know about a 
man is not whether he thinks himself literary, but 
whether his point of view is Socratic or sophistical. 
The professed champion of literature may be only a 
Bergsonian aesthete, who would have us get our vision 
of reality by " intuiting " the creative flux. M. Lanson 
is perfectly right in thinking that, as compared with 
that of many of his opponents, his own position is re- 
spectable. These opponents are undisciplined in them- 
selves as well as lacking in the discipline that comes 
from the assimilation of tradition ; whereas what M. 
Lanson has to offer may be a dehumanizing discipline, 
but it is a discipline. What is discrediting pure liter- 
ature and literary study both in France and elsewhere is 
the intolerable flabbiness of most of those who claim to 
represent it. A naturalistic age, whatever it may set 
out to be, will end by being imperialistic; and the tri- 
umph of the scientific investigator even in the literary 



CONCLUSION 387 

field is only one expression of the imperialistic idea. It 
is right that those who will not submit to any other 
discipline should at least have to submit to the disci- 
pline of the facts. The romantic dilettante who in order 
to enter the career of teaching is forced to bow his 
neck beneath the philological yoke is getting merely 
what he needs and deserves. 

Still a discipline in facts and in scientific and historic 
method is no equivalent for a true humanistic discipline. 
France in particular will suffer an irreparable loss if the 
new education results in a loosening or severing of the 
bond that connects it with its great humanistic past. A 
literal return to this past or to the past in general is, I 
have said, out of the question. We must have standards 
and select, but it must be on different principles. No poet, 
for example, has treated the problem of selection, which 
means in practice the problem of the freedom of the 
will, more profoundly than Dante. Yet Dante could 
scarcely have conceived of a selection entirely inde- 
pendent of two outer standards — the Pope in matters 
spiritual, the Emperor in matters temporal. 1 Nowadays 
if we have standards they must be inner standards, and 
therefore, as I have said, our problem has more in com- 
mon with the problem as it presented itself to Socrates 
and the sophists. The great effort of Socrates, we are 
told, was to recover that firm foundation for human life 
which a misuse of the new intellectual spirit was render- 
ing impossible. 2 To the excessive mental suppleness of 

1 See especially his De Monarchia. 

2 See Arnold's Speech at Eton in Mixed Essays. 



388 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

the sophists there is often added to-day an undue emo- 
tional pliancy. If some remedy is not found the modern 
world will, like the ancient Greek world, become the 
prey of its sophists. It will progress, not as our human- 
itarians would have us believe towards "some far-off 
divine event," but towards a decadent imperialism. What 
principle can set bounds to all this intellectual and emo- 
tional expansiveness ? In the words of Cardinal New- 
man, "What must be the face-to-face antagonist by 
which to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion 
and the all-corroding, all-dissolving energy of the intel- 
lect " — what he calls elsewhere " the wild living intel- 
lect of man " ? The reply would seem to be that this 
face-to-face antagonist will be found, if at all, not in 
a form of authority which has become impossible for so 
many moderns, but in the intuition of something at 
least as living as the intellect, which, in exact proportion 
as it is perceived, imposes, not merely on the intellect, 
but on man's whole being a controlling purpose. The 
world has been moving for some time past towards an 
entirely different order of intuitions, and in a philosophy 
like that of M. Bergson the pace has become headlong. 
I have, therefore, in my discussion of critical standards 
put considerable emphasis on a thinker like Emerson, 
who has a thoroughly modern view of authority, in 
some respects too modern a view, as I have tried to 
show, and is yet intuitive of the One rather than of the 
Many. 

In Emerson's study at Concord, which remains as at 
the time of his death, almost the first object that meets 



CONCLUSION 389 

one's eyes to the right on entering is a portrait of 
Sainte-Beuve. Emerson is said to have looked on this 
portrait as a special treasure. There is scarcely a single 
mention of Sainte-Beuve in Emerson's writings, and it 
is interesting to be able to connect even thus superficially 
men so different as the great doctor of relativity and 
the philosopher of the oversoul. The " Causeries du 
Lundi " and a book like " Representative Men " are at 
the opposite poles of nineteenth-century criticism ; yet 
for this very reason and in spite of his humanitarian il- 
lusions, — in spite, we may add, of his curiously de- 
fective feeling for the formal side of art, — Emerson is 
the necessary corrective of Sainte-Beuve, who has in- 
finite breadth and flexibility, but is lacking in elevation. 
This lack of elevation in Sainte-Beuve is not an acci- 
dental defect, but, as I have tried to show, bears a di- 
rect relation to his naturalistic method. The inadequacy 
of naturalism has been even more manifest in recent 
criticism. Sainte-Beuve himself maintained some balance 
between his regard for traditional standards and his as- 
piration towards wider sympathy and knowledge. This 
balance has not been preserved by his successors. 
Knowledge pursued as an end in itself and unsubordi- 
nated to any principle of judgment has degenerated 
into the narrowness of the specialist or into dilettante- 
ism. A too exclusive emphasis on breadth and keen- 
ness of sympathy has led to the excesses of the impres- 
sionist. I have quoted Sainte-Beuve's description of the 
critics of the First Empire as the " small change " of 
Boileau. If the critics of to-day are to be anything 



390 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

more than the small change of Sainte-Beuve — or 
rather of one side of Sainte-Beuve — they need to cul- 
tivate, as a counterpoise to their use of the historical 
and biographical method, a feeling for absolute values ; 
in short, they need to supplement Sainte-Beuve by what 
is best in a writer like Emerson. The point may be 
illustrated by two passages, each impressive in its own 
way. 

The first passage is from the end of " Port-Royal " 
where Sainte-Beuve is commenting on his own efforts 
to attain the truth : " How little we can do after all ! 
How bounded is our gaze — how much it resembles a 
pale torch lit up for a moment in the midst of a vast 
night ! And how impotent even he feels who has most 
at heart the knowing of his object, who has made it his 
dearest ambition to grasp it, and his greatest pride to 
paint it — how impotent he feels and how inferior to 
his task on the day when, this task being almost termi- 
nated and the result obtained, the intoxication of his 
strength dies away, when the final exhaustion and inevi- 
table disgust seize upon him, and he perceives in his 
turn that he is only one of the most fugitive of illu- 
sions in the bosom of the infinite illusion ! " 

This sense of universal flux and relativity can by 
itself result only in what I have called elsewhere a false 
disillusion, the disillusion of decadence. But there is 
another type of disillusion : the perception of unitymay 
become so intense that everything else seems unreal 
by comparison. To illustrate this, we may turn to Emer- 
son. " There is," he says, " no chance and no anarchy 



CONCLUSION 391 

in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god 
is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters 
the hall of the firmament ; there he is alone with them 
alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts and 
beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant and 
incessantly fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies him- 
self in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and 
whose movements and doings he must obey. . . . Every 
moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to 
baffle and distract him. And when by and by for an 
instant the air clears and the cloud lifts for a little, there 
are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones — 
they alone with him alone." 

In passages like this Emerson furnishes some hint 
of how it is possible to accept the doctrine of relativity 
without loss of one's feeling for absolute values, and 
without allowing one's self to be devoured by the sense of 
illusion, as Amiel was and Sainte-Beuve would have been 
if he had not found a sort of oblivion in unremitting 
toil. So far as Emerson does this, he aids criticism in 
its search for inner standards to take the place of the 
outer standards it has lost ; he helps it to see in the 
present anarchy the potentialities of a higher order. 
What we need, he says, is a " coat woven of elastic 
steel," a critical canon, in short, that will restore to its 
rights the masculine judgment but without dogmatic 
narrowness. With such a canon, criticism might still 
cultivate the invaluable feminine virtues — it might be 
comprehensive and sympathetic without at the same time 
being invertebrate and gelatinous. 



392 MODERN FRENCH CRITICISM 

Our ideal critic, then, would need to combine the 
breadth and versatility and sense of differences of a 
Sainte-Beuve with the elevation and insight and sense 
of unity of an Emerson. It might be prudent to add 
of this critic in particular what Emerson has said of 
man in general, that he is a golden impossibility. But 
even though the full attainment of our standard should 
prove impossible, some progress might at least be made 
towards tempering with judgment the all-pervading im- 
pressionism of contemporary literature and life. 



LIST OF CRITICS 



LIST OF CRITICS 

Note : This list makes no claim to completeness either in the names included 
or in the material given under each name. I have, however, aimed to record 
with some fulness the works of the more important writers who are primarily 
literary critics, but have in all cases been sparing in my references to books and 
articles on the authors I have listed. Those who wish more information may 
consult with profit H. P. Thieme's Guide Bibliographique de la Litterature fran- 
chise de 1800 a 1906, in spite of its numerous inaccuracies. The fourth volume 
of G. Lanson's Manuel bibliographique de la litterature francaise moderne, cover- 
ing the nineteenth century, is, I understand, to appear shortly. Excellent bib- 
liographical material will also be found in C. H. C. Wright's History of French 
Literature (1912), 883 ff. 

Albert (Paul), 1827-1880. 

Les poetes et la religion en Grece, 1863. — La poSsie, '68. — La prose, '69. — 
Histoire de la litterature romaine, 2 vols. '71. — La litterature francaise des ori- 
gines au XVI I e siecle, '72. — La litterature francaise au XVI I e siecle, '73. — La 
litterature francaise au XVIII e siecle, '74. — VariStis morales et litteraires, '79. — 
Poetes et poSsies, '81. — Histoire de la litterature frangaise au XIX e siecle, 2 
vols, (prepared from his notes by bis son, Maurice Albert), '82, '85. 

See Sainte-Beuve, N. Lundis, xn, 1869. 

Amiel (Henri-Frederic), 1821-1881. 

Caracteristique g6n£rale de Rousseau, in J.-J. Rousseau jugS par les Genevois 
d'aujourd'hui, 1879. — Fragments' d'un journal intime, precedes d'une etude pav 
Edmond Scherer, 2 vols., '83 (translated with introduction by Mrs. Humphry 
Ward, 2 vols., '85.) 

See Bourget, Nouveaux essais de psychologic contemporaine, 1885. — Berthe 
Vadier, H. F. Amiel ; '85. — Renan, Feuilles detachees, '87. — Matthew Arnold, 
Essays in Criticism (Second Series), '88. — Scherer, Etudes critiques, '89. 

Ampere (Jean- Jacques) , 1800-1864. Historian, etc. — Travels in Ger- 
many, Norway, etc. — Writes for Globe. — Professor of History and French 
Literature at College de France from 1833. — Elected to Academy, 1848. 

De V histoire de la poesie, 1830. — Literature et voyage, '33. — Histoire litte"- 
raire de la France avant le XII e siecle, '40. — Histoire litteraire de la France sous 
Charlemagne et durant les X e -XI e siecles, '41. — Histoire de la litterature fran- 
gaise au moyen dge, compare" e aux litt&ratures etrangeres, '41. — Ballanche, 3 vols., 
'48. — La Grece, Rome et Dante, '48. — Literature, voyages et poSsies, 2 vols., '50. 
— Promenade en Amerique ; Etats-Unis, Cuba, Mexique, 2 vols., '55. — L'histoire 
romaine a Rome, 4 vols., '65. — La science et les lettres enOrient, '65. — Melanges 
d'histoire litteraire et de litterature, 2 vols., '67, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits UttSraires, n, 1844; Portraits contemporains, 
in, '46; Nouveaux Lundis, xiii, '68. 

Angellier (Auguste), 1847-1911. Poet and critic. 

Robert Bums, 2 vols., 1893, etc. 

Aubertin (Charles), 1825-1908. 

U esprit public au XVII I e siecle (1715-89), 1873. — Les origines de la langue 



396 LIST OF CRITICS 

et de la poisie francaises, 74. — Histoire de la litterature et de la langue fran- 
caises, 76-78. — V 'eloquence politique et parlementaire en France avant 17 89, 
'82. — Origines et formation de la langue et de la metrique francaises, '82. — Les 
chroniqueursfr. au moyen dge, '96. — La versification fr. et ses nouveaux theoriciens, 
'98, etc. 

Balzac (Honore de), 1799-1850. — Balzac's chief attempts as a literary 
critic appeared in La Revue parisienne, 1840. 

Lettre aux ecrivains fr. du XIX e siecle, 1834. — Etudes critiques publiees dans 
la Chronique de Paris, '36. — Code litteraire, '56. — Fragments inSdits de la 
Revue parisienne, 70. 

See Balzac critique litteraire, in Au temps du romantisme, par A. Seche et Jules 
Bertaut, 1909. 

Barante (Prosper-Brugiere de), 1782-1866. Statesman, historian, etc. 

— Translates Schiller, 1821. 

Tableau de la litt. fr. au XVIII e siecle, 1809. — Melanges historiques et litti- 
raires, 3 vols., '35. — Etudes de litt. et d' histoire, '58. — Souvenirs du baron de 
Barante, 8 vols., '90-1901, etc. 

See A. Michiels, Histoire des idees litteraires, 1842. — Sainte-Beuve, Portraits 
contemporains, iv, '43. — Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, '82. — A. France, 
La vie litteraire, iv, '92. 

Barbey D'Aurevilly ( Jules- AmedSe), 1808-1889. Poet, novelist, etc. — 
A type of the Byronic dandy who survived into the second half of the nine- 
teenth century; a master of flamboyant paradox. His tone of truculent oppo- 
sition to the main tendencies of his time is very amusing if the reader does not 
get too much of it. 

Les Miserables de V. Hugo, 1862. — Les Jfi medaillons de VAcademie, '63. — 

— Goethe et Diderot, '80. — Le thedtre contemporain, 3 vols., '87-'92. — Pensies 
detachees, '88. — Polemiques d'hier, '89. — Most of Barbey's critical articles 
have been collected under the general title Les CEuvres et les Hommes du 
XIX e siecle, divided into three series, 17 vols., 1861-'99 (vol. rx missing). — 
Critiques diverses, 1910, etc. 

See Bourget, Etudes et portraits, 1889. — Tissot, Evolutions de la critique, '90. 

— France, La vie litteraire, in, '91. — Lemattre, Les contemporains, iv, '93. — 
L. Gautier, Portraits du XIX e siecle, '94. — Levallois, Memoires d'un critique, 
'96. — Doumic, Hommes et idees, 1903. — E. Grele, J. B. d 'Aw -evilly : sa vie et 
son amvre, '04. — E. Seilliere, Barbey d'Aurevilly, '10. 

Bardoux (Agenor), 1829-1897. 

Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages d'Andrieux, 1868. — Etudes sur la fin du XVII I e 
siecle, Comtesse de Beaumont, '84. — Etudes sociales et litteraires, Madame de 
Custine, '88. — Etudes d'un autre temps, '89. — Chateaubriand, '93. — Guizot, 
'94, etc. 

Barine (Arvede), Mme. Vincens, 1840-1908. 

Portraits de femmes, 1887. — Essais et fantaisies, 88. — Princesses et grandes 
dames, '90. — Bernardin de St.-Pierre, '91. — Alfred de Musset, '93. — Bour- 
geois et gens de pen, '94. — Nevros6s, '98. — Louis XIV et la Grande Mademoi- 
selle, 1905, etc. 

Baudelaire (Charles), 1821-1867. 

Most of B.'s critical writing will be found in Vol. n (CuriosiUs esthitiquea) 
and in Vol. ru (L'Art romantique) in the 7-volume 6dition Lemerre of 1870. 



LIST OF CRITICS 397 

Beaunier (Andr6), 1869. Novelist, journalist, critic. 

La poSsie nouvelle, 1902. — Eloges, '09, etc. 

Bedier (Joseph), 1864. Professor at the College de France. 

Le roman de Tristan et a" Yseult, traduit et restaur^ par J. Bbdier, 1900. — Etudes 
critiques, '03. — Les legendes ipiques, 2 vols., '08 (and numerous other studies 
on the Middle Ages). 

Bersot (Ernest), 1816-1880. Philosopher and moralist. 

La philosophic de Voltaire, 1848. — Etudes sur la philosophie du XVIII e 
siecle, '52. — Etudes sur le XVIII e siecle, 2 vols., '55. — Litt. et morale, '61. — 
Questions actuelles, '62. 

Blaze de Bury (Henri), 1813-1888. Literary and musical critic, historian, 
etc. Translator of Faust and other works of Goethe. 

Les ecrivains et poetes modernes de V Allemagne, 2 vols., 1846. — Les ecrivains 
modernes de V Allemagne, '68. — Tableaux romantiques de litt. et d'art, '78. — 
A. Dumas, sa vie, son temps, son ceuvre, '85. — Mes itudes et mes souvenirs, '85. — 
Goethe et Beethoven, '92, etc. 

Bire" (Edmond), 1829-1907. A reactionary'critic who investigated the de- 
tails of Hugo's life with a somewhat malignant accuracy. 

V. Hugo et la Restauration, 1869. — V. Hugo avant 1830, '83. — V. de La- 
prade, sa vie et ses ozuvres, '86. — Portraits UttSraires, '88. — Causeries UttS- 
raires, '89. — V. Hugo aprks 1830, 2 vols., '91. — Portraits historiques et litte- 
raires, '92. — V. Hugo apres 1852. L'exil, les derniSres anni.es et la mort du poete, 
'94. — [Histoireetlitt., '95. — Honorede Balzac, '97. — Causeries historiques, '97. — 
Nouvelles causeries litteraires, '97. — Dernieres causeries litteraires et historiques, 
'98. — Etudes d'histoire et de litt., 1900. — La presse royaliste de 1830 d 1852, 
'01. — Les dernieres annees de Chateaubriand, '02. — Biographies contempo- 
raines, '05. — Chateaubriand, V. Hugo, H. de Balzac, '07. — Ecrivains et soldats, 
2 vols., '07. — Mes souvenirs, '08. — Romans et romanciers contemporains, '08, etc. 

Boissier (Gaston), 1823-1908. Professor of Latin Literature at the Col- 
lege de France; member of the Academy from 1876. Possibly the most gifted 
literary critic among the Latinists of the nineteenth century. 

Le poete Attius, 1857. — Etude sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. T. Varron, '61. — 
Recherches sur la maniere dont furent recueillies les lettres de Ciceron, '63. — Ci- 
ceron et ses amis, '65. — La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, 2 vols., '74. 
— L' opposition sous les Cesars, '75. — Discours de reception, '77. — Promenades 
archeologiques ; Rome et PompSe, '80. — Le musee de St.-Germain, '82. — Nou- 
velles promenades archeologiques ; Horace et Virgile, '86. — Mme. de SSvignS, 
'87. — La fin du paganisme, 2 vols., '91. — Saint-Simon, '92. — VAfrique ro- 
maine, '93. — Tacite, 1903. — UAcademiefr. sous Vancien regime, '09, etc. 

Bordeaux (Henry), 1870. Novelist and critic. 

Villiers de VIsle Adam, 1891. —Edouard Rod, '93. —Teodor de Wyzewa, '94. 
— La vie et Vart, Ames modernes, '94. — La vie et Vart, Sentiments et idees de ce 
temps, '97. — Les ecrivains et les mozurs, (' '97-1900), 1900. — Portraits de femmes 
et d'enfants, 1900. — Les icrivains et les meeurs, (1900-'02), '02. — Pelerinages 
UttSraires, '06, etc. 

Bourget (Paul), 1852. At least as good a critic as he is novelist. The Essai3 
de psychologie contemporaine in particular are a remarkable record of the spir- 
itual maladies of the second half of the nineteenth century by one who has suf- 
fered from most of them. 



398 LIST OF CRITICS 

Ernest Renan, 1883. — Essais de psychologie contemporaine, '83. — Profils 
perdus, '84. — Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine, '85. — Etudes et 
portraits, 2 vols., '88, 3 e vol., 1906. — Discours de reception, '95. — Pages de 
critique et de doctrine, '12. 

Brisson (Adolphe), 1863. Editor of Les Annates. 

Portraits intimes, 5 vols., 1894-1901. — La comedie litteraire, '95. — Pointes 
seches, '98. — Nos humoristes, 1900. — L'envers de la gloire, 1905, etc. 

Broglie (le due Albert de), 1821-1901. 

Etudes morales et litteraires, 1853. — Nouvelles etudes de litt. et de morale, '68. 
r— Malherbe, '97. — Voltaire avant et pendant la guerre de Sept Ans, '98, etc. 

Brunetiere (Ferdinand), 1849 — 1906. — Unsuccessful in examination for 
Normal School, 1870. — Teaches at Pension Lelarge. — Begins to write for 
Revue des Deux Mondes, '75. — Maltre de conferences at Normal School, '86. 

— Lectures at Odeon, '91, etc. — Elected to Academy, '93. — Editor-in-chief 
of Revue des Deux Mondes, '93. — Visits the Vatican, '94. — Lectures in the 
United States, '97. — Excites anger of the " intellectuels " by his attitude in 
the Dreyfus affair. — Announces his conversion to Catholicism, 1900. — Loses 
his position at Normal School and fails to be elected Deschanel's successor at 
College de France. 

Etudes critiques sur I'histoire de la litt. fr., 8 vols., 1880-1907. — Le roman 
naturaliste, '83. — Histoire et litt., 3 vols., '84-'86. — Questions de critique, '89. 

— L' evolution des genres dans Vhistoire de la litt., i: Evolution de la critique 
depuis la Renaissance jusqu'a nos jours, '90. — Nouvelles questions de critique, 
'90. — Les ipoques du thedtre fr. (1636-1850), '92. — Essais sur la litt. contem- 
poraine, '92. — Discours de reception, '94. — L' evolution de la poesie lyrique en 
France au XIX e siecle, 2 vols., '94. — Education et instruction, '95. — La sci- 
ence et la religion, '95. — Nouveaux essais sur la litt. contemporaine,'' 95. — 
L'ideede patrie, '96. — La moralite de la doctrine evolutive, '96. — La Renaissance 
de Videalisme, '96. — Manuel de I'histoire de la litt. fr., '97. — Apres le proces. 
Reponse a quelques '"Intellectuels," '98. — L'art et la morale, '98. — Les ennemis 
de I'dme fr. '99. — Le genie latin, '99. — La nation et Varmee, '99. — Discours 
de combat, 3 vols., 1900-'07. — La liberie de V enseignement, '00. — Discours aca- 
demiques, '01. — Les raisons actuelles de croire, '01. — Les motifs d'esperer, '02. 

— V. Hugo. Lecons (prepared, under B.'s editorship, by students of Normal 
School), '02. — Cinq lettres sur E. Renan, '03. — L 'action sociale du Christia- 
nisme, '04. — Sur les chemins de la croyance, '04. — Histoire de la litt. fr. class- 
ique (1515-1830), vol. i (XVI* siecle), '05; vol. n (XVII* siecle), '12. — Varie- 
tes litteraires, '05. — H. de Balzac, '06. — Saint Vincent de Lerins, '06. — 
Questions actuelles, '07. — Etudes sur leXVIII e siecle,'!!. — Lettres de combat, 
'12. 

See J. Lemaitre, Les Contemporains, i, '85; vi, '96. — Faguet, Notes sur le 
thedtre contemporain, n, '89; Propos litteraires, n, '04. — Doumic, Ecrivains 
d'aujourd'hui, '94. — Ed. Dowden, New Studies in Literature, '95. — A. Brisson, 
Portraits intimes, n, '96. — Albalat, L'art d'ecrire, '96. — A. Darlu, M. Brune- 
tiere et I'individualisme, '98. — Pellissier, Etudes de litt. et de morale, '05. — V. 
Giraud, F. Brunetiere, '07. — G. Fonsegrive, Ferdinand Brunetiere, '08. — 
Faguet, Ferdinand Brunetiere, '11. 

Caro (Edme-Marie), 1826-1887. Philosopher, etc. He enjoyed a vogue in 
fashionable circles that reacted injuriously on his reputation. He is the original 



LIST OF CRITICS 399 

of Bellac in Pailleron's Le Monde oil Von s'ennuie. He is nevertheless a critic of 
real distinction. 

La philosophie de Goethe, 1866. — Le pessimisme au XIX e siecle, '78. — La 
fin du XVII I e siecle, 2 vols., '80. — George Sand, '88. — Melanges et portraits, 
2 vols., '88. — Poetes et romanciers, '88. — Varietes litteraires, '89, etc. 

See Brunetiere, Questions de critiques, 1888. 

Cestre (Charles), 1871. Professor at the University of Bordeaux. 

La Revolution fr. et les poetes anglais, 1906. — Bernard Shaw, '12, etc. 

Chasles (V.- E.-Philardte), 1798-1873. Spent seven years as a young man 
in England. — One of the editors of the Journal des Debats. — Professor at the 
College de France from 1847. 

Caracteres et paysages, 1833. — Le XVIII 6 siecle en Angleterre, '46. — Etudes 
sur VEspagne et sur les influences de la litt. espagnole en France et en Italie, '47. — 
Etudes sur le XV I e siecle en France, '48. — Etudes sur les hommes et les moeurs 
au XI X e siecle, '50. — Etudes sur la litt. et les moeurs en Angleterre au XIX e 
sihcle, '50. — Etudes sur la litt. et les moeurs des Anglo- Americains au XIX e 
stecle, '51. — Etudes sur W. Shakspeare, '52. — Etude sur VAllemagne ancienne 
et moderne, '54. — Voyages d'un critique a travers la vie et les livres, 2 series, '65- 
'68." — Etudes contemporaines, '66. — Portraits contemporains, '67. — Questions 
du temps et problemes d' autrefois, '67. — De VAcadSmie fr., de ses destinees et de 
son passe, '68. — Encore sur les contemporains, leurs oeuvres et leurs moeurs, '69. — 
L'Aretin, vie et [ecrits, '73. — L'antiquite, '75. — La psychologie sociale des nou- 
veaux peuples, '75. — Le moyen dge, '76. — Memoires, 2 vols., '76-'77. — La 
France, VEspagne et V Italie au XVII e siecle, '77. — V Angleterre au XV I e siecle, 
'79, etc. 

Chateaubriand (Francois-Ren§, vicomte de), 1768-1848. His literary 
opinions will be found scattered through the. Genie du Christianisme, 1802 (orig- 
inally had as subtitle Les Beautes de la religion chretienne) ; in his Itineraire, '11; 
in the essay Sur la litt. anglaise, '36; in the Memoires d'outre-tombe, '49-'50, and 
the volume of his collected works known as Melanges litteraires ; finally in his 
correspondance now in course of publication (Vol. i, 1912). 

See Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe litteraire, 2 vols., 1860. — 
Scherer, Etudes, i, '63. — Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, '82. — Faguet, 
Etudes sur le XIX e siecle. — Brunetiere, L'ivolution de la critique, '90. — 
Vogue, Heures d'histoire, '93. — Bire, Etudes et portraits, '94. — Doumic, 
Etudes sur la litt. fr., n, '98. 

Chenier (Marie- Joseph), 1764-1811. 

Presentation a S. M. VEmpereur et roi du rapport historique sur Vetat et les 
progr&s de la litt., 1808. — Tableau historique de Vetat et des progres de la litt. 
depuis 1789, '16. — Fragments du cours de litt. fait a V Athenee de Paris en 1806- 
'07, '18. 

See A. Michiels, Histoire des idees litteraires, 1842. 

Cherbuliez (Victor), 1829-1899. Novelist and critic. 

A propos d 'un cheval, ou Un cheval de Phidias, 1860. — Etudes de litt. et d'art, 
'73. — Hommes et choses d'Allemagne, '77. — Hommes et choses du temps pre- 
sent, '83. — Discours de reception, '88. — Profils Strangers, '89. — Vart et la 
nature, '92. — L'ideal romanesque en France de 1610 a 1816, 1912, etc. 

See Brunetiere, Discours academiques, '01. — Faguet, Propos litteraires, i, '02. 

Chuquet (Arthur), 1853. Professor at the College de France; editor of 
Revue critique, etc. 



400 LIST OF CRITICS 

J. -J. Rousseau, 1893. — Etudes de litt. allemande, 2 vols., 190O-'02. — Stend- 
hal-Beyle, '02. — Litt. allemande, '09, etc. 

Cousin (Victor), 1792-1867. Philosopher and historian. — Professor at the 
Sorbonne. — Course discontinued by the Government, 1820. — Lectures again 
with great success in '28. — Engages in politics during July Monarchy. — 
Minister of Public Instruction in '40, etc. 

Des pensees de Pascal, 1842 (Etudes sur Pascal, o^ mc edition, revues et aug- 
menU.es, '57). — Fragments litteraires, '43. — Jacqueline Pascal, '44. — Mme. 
de Longueville pendant la Fronde, La Jeunesse de Mme. de Longueville, 2 vols., '53. 

— Mme. de Sable, '54. — Mme. de Hautefort, La duchesse de Chevreuse, 2 vols., 
'56. — Fragments et souvenirs litteraires, '57. — La societe jr. pendant le XVI I e 
siecle, 2 vols., '58, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires, in, 1844. — Cuvillier-Fleury, Etudes 
historiques et litteraires, n, '54. — Taine, Les philosophes jr. auXIX e siecle, '57. — 
Renan, Essais de morale et de critique, '59. — Charles Secretan, La philosophic 
de V. Cousin, '68. — Scheier, Etudes critiques sur la litt. contemporaine, iv, '73. — 
Janet, V. Cousin et son ozuvre, '85. — Caro, Philosophic et philosophes, '88. — 
Barthelemy St.-Hilaire, M. V. Cousin et sa correspondance, 3 vols., '95. — 
Faguet, Politiques et moralistes au XIX e siecle, n, '98. 

Croiset (Alfred), 1845. — Professor of Greek at the Sorbonne. 

Xinophon, son caractkre et son talent, 1873. — La Poesie de Pindareet les his 
du lyrisme grec, '80. — Hist, de la litt. grecque (in collaboration with his brother 
Maurice Croiset), 5 vols., '87-'99. — Aristophane et les partis a Attenes, '07, etc. 

Cuvillier-Fleury (Alfred-Auguste) , 1802-1887. Literary critic of the 
Journal des Debats from 1834. — Member of Academy from '66. — A critic 
of conservative taste. What he objected to in the romanticists was " le 
materialisme du style." 

Melanges de critique et d'histoire, 11 vols., 1852-'65. — Etudes historiques et 
litteraires, 2 vols., '54. — Nouvelles etudes historiques et litteraires, '55. — Der- 
nibres etudes historiques et litteraires, 2 vols., '59. — Historiens, poetes et romanciers, 
2 vols., '63. — Etudes et portraits, 2 vols., '65-'68. — Posthumes et revenants, 
'78. — Journal intime, 1900. 

See Merlet, Portraits d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, '65. — A. France, La vie litte"raire, 
i, '88. 

Daunou (Pierre-Claude-Francois), 1761-1840. Historian, etc. 

De V influence deBoileau sur la litt. fr., 1787. — Discours sur I'etat des lettres 
au XIII e si&cle, 1814. — Continues Histoire litttraire de la France and con- 
tributes many articles on writers of 12th and 13th centuries, etc. 

Deschamps (Gaston), 1861. 

La vie et les livres, 6 vols., 1894-1904. — Marivaux, '97, etc. 

Deschanel (Emile), 1819-1904. The paradox on the "romanticism of the 
classics " that Deschanel maintained through several volumes does not seem 
of much significance for literary criticism. 

Physiologie des ecrivains et des artistes, ou essai de critique naturelle, 1864. — 
Etudes sur Aristophane, '67. — A bdtons rompus, varietes morales et Utt6raires,'(}8. 

— Almanach des conferences et de la litt., '70. — Benjamin Franklin, '82. — Le 
romantisme des classiques, 5 vols., '82-'86. — Lamartine, 2 vols., '93. — Les de- 
formations de la langue fr., '98, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, ix, '64. — Lemaltre, Les contemporains, 
vn, '99. — G. Deschamps, La vie et les livres, v, 1900. 



LIST OF CRITICS 401 

Desjardins (Paul), 1859. 

La mithode des classiques fr., 1904. 

Doudan (Ximenes), 1800-1872. Preceptor of Louis-Alphonse de Rocca, 
son of Mme. de Stael by her second marriage; later preceptor of Paul and Al- 
bert de Broglie. — Held a position in the Government under the due de Broglie 
and spent the rest of his life in his household. — Doudan's letters to various 
friends, along with a few articles he had contributed to the Revue francaise, 
were published in 1876-'77, under the title of Melanges et Lettres (4 vols.), 
with introductory notices by M. d'Haussonville, Silvestre de Sacy, and Cu- 
villier-Fleury. — Doudan is a type of the distinguished valetudinarian. He 
shows a delicacy and penetration in many of his literary judgments that re- 
mind one of Joubert. 

Doumic (Rene) , 1860. A regular contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes. 

— Member of Academy from 1909. — Very conservative in his point of view. 
His special note may perhaps be best defined as a somewhat caustic good sense. 

Elements d'histoire litteraire, 1888. — Portraits d' ecrivains, '92. — Notice sur 
les ecrivains maritimes et militaires, '92. — De Scribe a Ibsen, '93. — Etudes lit- 
teraires sur les auteurs fr. prescrits pour Vexamen du brevet superieur, '93. — 
Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui, '94. — La vie et les moeurs au jour le jour, '95. — Les 
jeunes, '95. — Essais sur le thedtre contemporain, '96. — Etudes sur la litt. fr., 6 
vols., '96-1909. — Histoire de la litt. fr., '00. — Hommes et idees du XIX e siecle, 
'03. — Lettres d'Elvire a Lamartine, '05. — Le thedtre nouveau, '08. — George 
Sand, '09. — Lamartine, '12, etc. 

Du Camp (Maxime), 1822-1894. Novelist, traveller, soldier (one of Gari- 
baldi's " Thousand "), etc.; intimate of Flaubert. — Member of Academy from 
1880. 

Souvenirs litteraires, 2 vols., 1882-'83. — Theophile Gautier, '90, etc. 

Dumas flls (Alexandre), 1824-1895. 

Discours de reception, 1875. — Les prefaces, '77. — Reponse a M. Leconte de 
Lisle, successeur de V. Hugo, '87. 

Dupuy (Ernest), 1849. 

Les grands maitres de la litt. russe au XIX e siecle, 1885. — Victor Hugo, '86. 

— Victor Hugo, son ozuvre poetique, '87. — Bernard Palissy, '94. — Paradoxe 
sur le comedien de Diderot, 1902, etc. 

Ernest-Charles (Jean), 1875. Editor, literary and dramatic critic. 
La litt.fr. d'aujourd'hui, 1902. — Les Samedis litteraires, 5 vols., '03-'07. — 
La carriere de Maurice Barres, '07, etc. 

Faguet (Emile), 1847. Professor of French Poetry at the Sorbonne from 
1897; member of Academy from 1900. — The most prominent French critic 
of ideas now living. As a literary critic, he seems to me very inferior to M. 
Lemaitre. His best and most characteristic work is probably found in his Po- 
litiques et moralistes. He shows here and elsewhere a brilliancy and intellectual 
ubiquity that is not sufficiently controlled by any vigorous synthesis of his own. 
Recently he has been pouring out volumes at a rate that suggests a certain in- 
tellectual incontinence. 

La tragedie fr. au XVI e siecle, 1883. — Les grands maitres au XVI I e siecle, 
'85. — Notices litteraires sur les auteurs fr., '85. — La Fontaine,\' 85. — Corneille, 
'85. — Recueil de textes des auteurs fr., '85. — Etudes litteraires du XIX e siecle, 
'87. — Notes sur le thedtre contemporain, 7 vols., '89-'95. — Etudes litteraires 



402 LIST OF CRITICS 

du XV IP sibcle, '90. —Etudes litteraires du XV P siecle, '93. — Politiques et 
moralistes du XIX e siecle, 3 vols., '91-'99. — Voltaire, '94. — Cours de poisie fr. a 
V Universite de Paris, '97. — Drame ancien, drame moderne, '98. — Flaubert, '99. 
— Question politique, '99. — Histoire de la litt. fr., 2 vols., 1900. — ProbUmes 
politiques du temps present, '01. — Andre Chenier, '02. — Le liberalisme, '02. — La 
politique comparee de Montesquieu, Rousseau et Voltaire, '02. — Propos litteraires, 
i, '02; ii, '04; m, '05; iv, '08; v,'09. — Propos dethedtre,i, '03; n, '05; in, iv, '06; 
v, '10. — Zola, '03. — Enlisant Nietzsche, '04. — Simplification simple de Vortho- 
graphe, '05. — Amours de gens de lettres,' 06. — Uanticlericalisme, 06. — Le socia- 
lisme en 1907, '07. — Le Pacifisme, '08. — Discussions politiques, '09. — Les dix 
commandements, i, De V amour, n, De Vamitie", 2 vols. '09. — La demission de la 
morale, '10. — Madame de Sevigne, '10. — Le culte de V incompetence, 2 vols., 
'10. — Vie de Rousseau, '11. — Ferdinand Brunetiere, '11. — En lisant les beaux 
vieux livres, '11. — Les dix commandements : de la profession,' 11. — Les dix com- 
mandements: de Dieu, '11. — Et Vhorreur des responsabilites (suite au Culte de 
V incompetence), '11. — Les prejuges necessaires, 11. — Les amies de Rousseau, 
'12. — Rousseau contre M oiler e, 12. — Ce que disent les livres, 12. 

See M. Duval, E. Faguet, le critique, le moraliste, le sociologue, 11. 

Fauriel (Claude-Charles), 1772-1844. Private secretary to Napoleon's 
police agent, Fouche, to 1802. — Professor at the Sorbonne from '30. — Member 
of Academie des Inscriptions from '36. 

La Partheneide, poeme de J. Baggesen traduit de l'allemand par C. F. (with 
important preliminary discourse), 1810. — Le comte de Carmagnola et Adelghis, 
tragedies d'Alexandre Manzoni, traduites de l'italien par C. F. ; suivied'un arti- 
cle de Goethe et de divers morceaux sur la th&orie de Vart dramatique, '23. — Chants 
populaires de la Grece moderne, 2 vols., '24-'25. — Histoire de la Gaule meridio- 
nale sous la domination des conquerants germains, 4 vols., '36. — Histoire de la 
croisade contre les hAretiques albigeois (traduite du provencal) , '37. — Histoire 
de la poesie provengale, 3 vols., '47. — Dante et les origines de la langue et de la 
litt. italienne, 2 vols., '54 (this work as well as the preceding was published from 
notes taken at his courses by J. Mohl). — Les dernier s jours du Consulat, '85. — 
Correspondance de Fauriel et Mary Clarke, 1911. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, iv, 1845. — A. Ozanam, Melanges, 
n, '59. — J. B. Galley, Claude Fauriel, 1909 (for very full list of publications of 
Fauriel and works on him see 488 ff ) . 

Feletz (Charles-Marie Dorimont, abbe de), 1767-1850. An editor of the 
Journal des Debats from 1801; member of Academy from 1827, etc. He is at 
once keen and amiable in his criticism. 

Melanges de philosophie, d'histoire, et de litt., 4 vols., 1828. — Jugements his- 
toriques et litteraires sur quelques ecrivains et sur quelques ecrits du temps, '40. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, i, '50. — Villemain, Souvenirs con- 
temporains d'histoire et de litt., i, 1853. 

Filon (Augustin), 1841. 

Guy Patin, sa vie, sa correspondance, 1862. — Etudes sur les lettres portugaises 
(1669), '63. — Histoire de la litt. anglaise, '83. — Profits anglais, '93. — Meri- 
mee et ses amis, '94. — Le thedtre anglais. Hier, aujourd'hui, demain, '96. — 
De Dumas a Rostand, '98. — Merim6e, '98. — La caricature en Angleterre, 1902, 
etc. 

Flat (Paul) , 1865. Novelist, art critic, etc. ; editor of Revue Bleue. 

Essais sur Balzac, 1893. — Seconds essais sur Balzac, '94. — Nos femmes de 
lettres, 1908, etc. 



LIST OF CRITICS 403 

Fontanes (le comte Louis de), 1759-1821. Poet and critic. — Became 
acquainted with Chateaubriand when both were exiles in London. — Grand 
Master of the University from 1808. 

Extraits critiques du Genie du Christianisme, 1802. — (Euvres, 2 vols., avec 
notices de Chateaubriand et de Sainte-Beuve, '39. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe litteraire, 1860. 

France (Anatole), 1844. If M. France's criticism is often that of a creator, 
his creative writing (novels, etc.) , on the other hand, is very much permeated 
by criticism. 

Alfred de Vigny, 1868. — B. de Saint-Pierre et Marie Miesnik, '75. — Lucile 
de Chateaubriand, '79. — La vie litteraire, 4 vols., '88-'94. — L'Elvire deLamar- 
tine, '93. — Discours de reception, '97. — Discours prononce a V inauguration de 
la statue d'E. Renan a Treguier, 1903. — Funerailles d'E. Zola, '03, etc. 

For controversy with Brunetiere see prefaces to the four volumes of his Vie 
litteraire ; also Brunetiere, Essais sur la litterature contemporaine (La Critique 
impressioniste) , '91, etc. 

Gautier (Theophile), 1811-1872. Much of Gautier's critical writing was 
done as hack work for various newspapers (in his own phrase he turned the mill 
of the feuilleton), especially (from 1845), for the Moniteur and Journal Officiel. 
His criticism is remarkable for its extreme appreciativeness. He is a "creative" 
critic in the sense that is given to that phrase by certain neo-romanticists. A 
classicist would say that he confuses the genres. 

Les Jeune-France, 1833. — Preface de Mile, de Maupin, '35. — Les grotesques, 
2 vols., '44. — Zigzags, '45. — Le Salon de 1847, '47. — Vart moderne, '52. — 
Caprices et Zigzags, '52. — Histoire de Vart dramatique en France depuis 25 ans, 
6 vols., '58-'59. — H. de Balzac, '59. — Tresors d'art de la Russie ancienne et mod- 
erne, '61-'63. — Les dieux et les demi-dieux de la peinture, '63. — Histoire du 
romantisme, '74. — Portraits contemporains, '74. — Portraits et souvenirs, '75. 

— Fusains et eaux-fortes, '80. — Souvenirs de thedtre, d'art et de critique, '83. 
See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, n, 1838; Premiers lundis, u, 

'38. — Baudelaire, Th. Gautier ; Notice litteraire precedee d'une lettre de V. Hugo, 
'59. — Brandes, The Romantic School in France, '82. — Montegut, Nos morts 
contemporains, n, '84. — Faguet, Etudes sur le XIX e siecle, '87. 

Gazier (Augustin) , 1844. Historian and critic. — Chiefly interested in 
Port-Royal. 

Petite histoire de la litt. fr. depuis la Renaissance, 1891. — Melanges de litt. 
et d'histoire, 1904. — Port- Roy al-des-Champs, '05. — line suite a Vhistoire de 
Port-Royal, '06. — Abrege de Vhistoire de Port-Royal, '09. — Port-Royal au 
XVII e siecle, '09, etc. 

Gebhart (Emile), 1839-1908. Professor of Foreign Literature at the 
Sor bonne; Member of Academy, etc. 

Histoire du sentiment poetique de la nature dans Vantiquite' grecque et romaine, 
1860. — Praxitele, essai sur Vhistoire de Vart et du genie grecs, '64. — De Vltalie ; 
essais de critique et d'histoire, '76. — Rabelais, la Renaissance et la Re" forme, '77. 

— Les origines de la Renaissance en Italie, '79. — Introduction a Vhistoire du 
sentiment religieux en Italie depuis la fin du XII e si&cle au Concile de Trente, '84. 

— Etudes meridionales ; la Renaissance italienne, et la philosophic de Vhistoire, 
'87. — L' Italie mystique, '90. — Autour d 'une tiare (1075-'85), '93. — Rabelais, 
'95. — Le baccalaureat et les Uudes classiques, '99. — Conteurs Florentins du 
moyen dge, '01. — Sandro Botticelli, '07. — Michel Ange, '08, etc. 



404 LIST OF CRITICS 

Geoffroy ( Julien-Louis) , 1743-1814. Pupil of Jesuits and professor at the 
College Louis-le-Grand. Collaborates with Freron on Annee litteraire. — In 
hiding during Revolution. — Creates literary feuilleton as dramatic critic of 
Journal des Debats, 1800-' 14. 

Discours sur la critique, 1779. — Cows de litt. dramatique, 6 vols., 1819-'20. 

— Manuel dramatique, '22, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, i, 1850. — Lemaitre, Geoffroy, in Livre 
du centenaire du Journal des Debats, '89. — Des Granges, Geoffroy et la 
litterature dramatique sous le consulat et V empire, '97. 

Geruzez (Eugene-Nicolas), 1799-1865. 

Histoire de V eloquence politique et religieux, 2 vols., 1837-'38. — Essais de litt. 
fr., 2 vols., '39. — Essais d'histoire litteraire, '39. — Cours de litt. conforme au 
plan d' etudes des lycees, '41. — Nouveaux essais d' histoire litteraire, '45. — 
Etudes litteraires sur les ouvrages fr. prescrits pour les examens des baccalaureats 
es lettres et es science, '49. — Histoire de la litt. fr. du moyen dge aux temps mo- 
dernes, '52. — Histoire de la litt. fr. pendant la Revolution (1789-1800), '59. — 
Histoire de la litt. fr., 2 vols., '61. — Histoire abregee de la litt. fr., '62. — Me- 
langes et pensees, '66. 

Gidel (Antoine-Charles), 1827-1899. 

Etude sur la litt. grecque moderne, 1866. — Les Francais au XVII e siecle, '73. 

— Histoire de la litt. fr., 4 vols., '74-'88. — L'art d'ecrire, '78. — Dictionnaire- 
Manuel illustre des ecrivains et des litt. (avec F. Loliee), '97. 

Giraud (Victor), 1868. 

Pascal, Vhomme, Voeuvre, Vinfluence, 1898. — Taine et le pessimisme, '98. — 
La philosophic de Taine, '99. — Essai sur Taine, 1900. — Taine (bibliographic), 
'02. — Histoire des variations d'une page de Chateaubriand, '03. — La philo- 
sophic religieuse de Pascal et la pensee contemporaine, '03. — Chateaubriand. 
Etudes litteraires '04. — Anticlericalisme et catholicisme, '06. — Livres et ques- 
tions d'aujourd'hui, '06. — Ferdinand Brunetiere, '07. — Les Idees morales 
d' Horace, '07. — Les Maitres de Vheure, '11. — Nouvelles etudes sur Chateau- 
briand,'^, etc. 

Les de Goncourt freres. Jules, 1830-1870. Edmond, 1822-1896. Nov- 
elists, etc. 

Histoire de la societe fr. pendant le Directoire, 1855. — L'art au XV IIP siecle, 
3 vols., '56-'65. — Portraits intimes du XVIIP siecle, 2 vols., '57-'58. — Le 
journal des Goncourt, 7 vols., '87-'95. — Prefaces et manifestes litteraires, '88. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, iv, 1862; x, '66. — Bourget, Nou- 
veaux essais de psychologie contemporaine, '85. — Lemaitre, Les Contemporains, 
in, '88. — France, La vie litteraire, i, '88. — Doumic, Portraits d' ecrivains, '92; 
Etudes sur la litt. fr., n, '98. 

Gourmont (R§my de) , 1860. Editor of Mercure de France. — Ultra-aes- 
thetic in his point of view. 

Le Latin mystique, 1892. — La Poesie populaire, '96. — Esthetique de la langue 
fr., '99. — La culture des idees, '00. — Le Probleme du style, '02. — Promenades 
litteraires, 3 vols., '05-'09. — Dante, Beatrice et la poesie amoureuse, '08, etc. 

Greard (Octave), 1828-1904. Exercised both by his writings and as an ad- 
ministrator an important influence on modern French education. — Member 
of Academy from 1886. 

Precis de litt., 1875. — Discours de reception, '88. — Edmond Scherer, '90. — 
Prevost-Paradol, '94, etc. 



LIST OF CRITICS 405 

Guizot (Francois-Pierre- Guillaume), 1787-1874. Historian, statesman, 
etc. — Begins lecturing at the Sorbonne, 1812. — Course suspended by Govern- 
ment in '22. — Begins lecturing again at same time as Cousin and Villemain 
in '28. — Appointed Minister of Interior by Louis-Philippe, '30. — Member 
of Academy from '36. — Virtually Premier from '40 to '48. 

Shakespeare et son temps, 1852. — Discours academiques, '61. — Melanges 
biographiques et litteraires, '68, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, i, 1850; Nouveaux lundis, i, '61; ix, 
'64. — Taine, Essais de critique et d'histoire, '58. — Scherer, Etudes critiques sur 
la litt. contemporaine, i, '63; iv, '73. — Faguet, Politiques et moralistes au XI X e 
siecle, '91. 

Haussonville (le vicomte Othenin d'), 1843. — Member of Academy 
from 1888. 

C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, sa vie et ses ozuvres, 1875. — Etudes biographiques et lit- 
teraires, '79. — Le salon de Mme. Necker, 2 vols., '82. — Prosper M6rim6e, '88. 
— Mme. Ackermann, d'apres des lettres et papiers inedits, '92. — Lacordaire, 
'95. — Souvenirs sur Mme. de Maintenon, 3 vols., 1902-'05. — A VAcadimie 
francaise et autour de V Academie, '07, etc. 

Hauvette (Henri), 1865. Professor of Italian at the Sorbonne. 
Luigi Alamanni, 1903. — Litt. italienne, '06. — Ghirlandaio, '08. — Dante, 
'11, etc. 

Hennequin (Emile), 1859-1888. Drowned while bathing in the Seine. 
The scientific theories of H., which attracted much attention a few years ago, 
are already beginning to seem pseudo-scientific. He has remarks of great pene- 
tration interspersed with remarks like the following: " Predominance probable, 
dans l'organisme cerebral de Victor Hugo, . . . de la troisieme circonvolution 
frontale." 

La critique scientifique, 1888. — Etudes de critique scientifique. Ecrivains fran- 
cises, '89. — Etudes de critique scientifique. Quelques ecrivains jr., '90. 

See Brunetiere, Questions de critique, '88. — Tissot, Les evolutions de la 
critique fr., '90. — Rod, Nouvelles etudes sur le XIX e siecle, '98. 

Hugo (Victor) , 1802-1885. His general outlook on life was uncritical or, one 
might say, anti-critical. For his literary opinions see various prefaces to Odes 
et Ballades (1822, '24, '26, '28, '53) ; also prefaces to his other volumes of verse 
(Feuilles d'automne, '34; Chants du Crepuscule, '35; Les voix interieures, '37; Les 
Rayons et les ombres, '40; Les Contemplations, '56, etc.). His most important 
manifesto was his Preface de Cromwell, '27 (ed. M. Souriau, with very full in- 
troduction, '97). — See also prefaces to other plays (Hernani, '29; Marion de 
Lorme, '30; LeRoi s' 'amuse, '32; Lucrece Borgia, '33; Marie Tudor, '33; Angelo, 
'35; RuyBlas, 36; Les Burgraves, '43). — Litt. et philosophic m&lees, 2 vols., '34. — 
William Shakespeare, '64. — Discours pour Voltaire, '78, etc. 

Janin (Jules), 1804-1874. Dramatic critic of Journal des DSbats from 1830. 
Styled in his own day the " prince of critics." Expansive and superficial, a sort 
of bourgeois impressionist. He defined the feuilleton as " un petit cri de joie 
que nous arrache le spectacle du jour." 

Histoire de la litt. dramatique, 6 vols., 1853-'58. — Critiques, portraits et carac- 
teres contemporains, '59. — Varietes litteraires, '59. — Biranger et son temps, 
2 vols., '66. — CEuvres diverses, 12 vols., '76-'78. — (Euvres de jeunesse, 5 vols., 
'81-83, etc. 

See F. Pyat, M. J. Chinier et le prince des critiques (J. Janin), 1844. — 



406 LIST OF CRITICS 

Planche, Portraits littiraires, '53. — Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, n, '50; 
v, '51. — B. d'Aurevilly, Les aeuvres et les hommes, iv, '65. — Gautier, Portraits 
contemporains, '74. 

Joubert (Joseph) . Born at Montignac, 1754 ; died at Paris, 1824. — Student 
and professor in the College des Peres de la Doctrine Chretienne (Toulouse). — 
Goes to Paris, 1778, and meets Diderot, La Harpe, etc. — Becomes intimate 
with Fontanes. — Elected Justice of Peace at Montignac, 1790. — Marriage, 
1793. — Settles at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. — Appointed " inspecteur et conseiller 
de l'Universite," 1809. 

Selection of Pensees published by Chateaubriand, 1838. — Enlarged edi- 
tion published by nephew of Joubert, M. Paul de Raynal (Pensies, Essais, 
Maximes et Correspondance, 2 vols., 1842; 4 e ed., augm., '64). — Pensies de 
Joubert; reproduction de l'edition originale. Introduction et notes par V. 
Giraud, 4 e ed., 1911. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littiraires, n, 1838; Causeries du lundi, i, '49. — 
Sacy, Varietes litteraires, i, '58. — Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, '65. — 
P. de Raynal, Les correspondants de Joubert {1785-1822), '83. — Lemaltre, Les 
contemporains, vi, '96. — Pailhes, Du Nouveau sur Joubert, 1900. 

Jusserand (Jules), 1855. French ambassador to United States from 1902. 
Les Anglais au moyen dge. L'Epopee mystique de William Langland, 1893. — 
Histoire litteraire du peuple anglais : i, Des origines a la Renaissance, '94; n, De 
la Renaissance a la guerre civile, 1904. — Histoire abregee de la litt. anglaise, '95- 

— Shakespeare en France sous Vancien rSgime, '98, etc. 

Lamartine (Alphonse), 1790-1869. Most of his literary criticism was 
written under pecuniary stress in his old age. 

Des Destinees de la po6sie, 1834. — Cours familier de litt., 28 vols., '56-'69. 

— Bossuet, '64. — Ciceron, '64. — Shakspeare et son ozwore, '64. — Balzac et 
son wuvre, '65. — Trois poetes italiens : Dante, Pitrarque, Le Tasse {extrait du 
cours de litt.), '92. — Philosophic et litt., '94, etc. 

Laprade, Victor de, 1812-1883. Poet and critic. — Professor at University 
of Lyons. — Succeeds A. de Musset at Academy, '58. 

Le genie litteraire de la France, 1848. — Du sentiment de la nature dans la 
poesie d'Homere, '48. — Le sentiment de la nature avant le christianisme, '66. — 
Le sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, '67. — Essais de critique idealiste, 
'82. — Histoire du sentiment de la nature, '83. 

Larroumet (Gustave), 1852-1904. 

Marivaux, sa vie et ses ozuvres, 1883. — La Comidie de Moliere. Uauteur et le 
Milieu, '86. — Salon de 1892, '92. — Notice sur le prince Napoleon Bonaparte, 
'92. — Etudes d' histoire et de critique dramatique, '92. — Etudes de litt. et d'art, 
4 vols., '93-'96. — Meissonier, '93. — L'artetl'Etat en France, '95. — La maison 
de V. Hugo. Impressions de Guernesey, '95. — Petits portraits et notes d'art, '97. — 
La France en Orient, '98. — Racine, '98. — Vers Athenes et Jerusalem. Journal 
de voyage en Grece et en Syrie, '98. — Nouvelles Uudes d'histoire et de critique 
dramatique, '99. — Derniers portraits, 1904. 

Lasserre (Pierre), 1867. 

La crise chritienne, 1891. — Charles Maurras et la renaissance classique, 1902. 
—La morale de Nietzsche, '02. — Les idees de Nietzsche sur la musique, '07. — 
Le romantisme jr., '07. — M. Croiset historien de la democratic athinienne, '09. 

— La Doctrine officieUe de V University, '12, etc. 



LIST OF CRITICS 407 

Lanson (Gustavo), 1857. Professor of French literature at the Sorbonne. 

Principea de composition et de style, 1887. — Nivelle de La Chaussie et la 

comidie larmoyante, '88. — Bossuet, '90. — Choix de lettres du XVII e siecle, '90. 

— Conseils sur Vart d'ecrire, '90. — Etudes pratiques de composition fr., '91. — 
Boileau, '92. — Histoire de la litt. fr., '94. — Hommes et livres, '95. — Corneille, 
'95. — L'universite et la society moderne, 1901. — Voltaire, '06. — L'Art de la 
prose, '08. — Manuel bibliographique de la litt. fr., i (XVI e siecle), '09; n (XVII e 
siecle), '10; in, (XVIII 6 siecle), '11. — Troismoisd'enseignementauxEtats-Unis, 
'12, etc. 

Leconte de Lisle, 1820-1894. His most important critical manifesto is 
the preface to his Poemes antiques, 1852. 

Lefranc (Abel), 1863. Professor at the College de France. 
Les dernier es poesies de Marguerite de Navarre, 1898 (and numerous other 
studies on the 16th century). — La langue et la litt. fr. au College de France, '04. 

— Defense de Pascal, 1907. — Lecons sur Moliere, '04-'09. — Etudes sur Maurice 
Guerin, '08, etc. 

Legouis (Emile), 1861. Professor of English literature at the Sorbonne. 
Le general Michel Beaupuy (in collaboration with Georges Bussiere), 1891. 

— La jeunesse de William Wordsworth, '96. — Geoffrey Chaucer, '11. — Defense 
de la poesie francaise a Vusage des lecteurs anglais, 1912, etc. 

Lemaitre (Jules), 1853. 

La comedie apres Moliere et le thedtre de Dancourt, 1882. — Quomodo Cornelius 
nosier Aristotelis poeticam sit interpretatus, '82. — Les contemporains, 7 vols., 
'85-'99. — Impressions de thedtre, 10 vols., '88-'98. — Corneille et la poitique 
d'Aristote, '88. — Quatre discours, 1900. — Opinions a rSpandre, '02. — Theories 
et impressions, '03. — En marge des vieux livres, '05; 2< serie, '08. — Rous- 
seau, '07. — Racine, '08. — Fcnelon, '10. — Chateaubriand, '12, etc. 

See A. France, La vie UtUraire, i, 1888; n, '90. — Pellissier, Nouveaux 
essais de litt. contemporaine, '94; Etu des de litt. contemporaine, n, 1900. — 
Doumic, Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui, '95. 

Lemercier (Nepomucene), 1771-1840. Dramatist, etc. 
Cours analytique de litt. generate, 4 vols., 1817. 

See G. Vauthier, Essai sur la vie et les ozuvres de N. Lemercier, '86. — M. 
Souriau, N. Lemercier et ses correspondents, '08. 

Lenient (Charles), 1826-1906. 

Etude sur Bayle, 1855. — La satire en France au moyen dge, '59. — La satire 
en France ou la litt. militante au XV I e siecle, '66. — Conferences sur les ozuvres 
poitiques de M. Pierre Lebrun, '66. — La comidie en France au XVI II e siecle, 
'88. — La po6sie patriotique en France au moyen dge, '91. — La poe"sie patriotique 
en France, 2 vols., '94. — La comedie en France au XIX e siecle, 2 vols., '98, etc. 

Levallois (Jules), 1829-1903. Sainte-Beuve's secretary for a number of 
years. 

Critique militante, 1862. — Sainte-Beuve, '72. — Corneille inconnu, '76. — 
Un pre'curseur : Senancour, '97, etc. 

Lintilhac (Eugene), 1854. 

Beaumarchais et ses ozuvres, 1887. — PrScis historique et critique de la litt. fr. 
depuis les origines a nos jours, 2 vols., '91-'94. — Supplement aux Etudes lit- 
Uraires sur les classiques des classes supirieures et du baccalaure'at es lettres, '92. 



408 LIST OF CRITICS 

— Lesage, '93. — Les fSlibres, '94. — Le miracle grec d'Homere a Aristote, '96. 

— Conferences dramatiques, '98. — Michelet, '98. — Le probleme de Venseigne- 
ment secondaire, '98. — Histoire du thedtre en France, i, 1904; n, '06; in, '08; rv, 
'09; v, '11. 

Livet (Charles-Louis), 1828-1898. 

La grammaire fr. et les grammairiens au XVII e siecle, 1859. — PrScieux et 
precieuses, '59. — Portraits du grand siecle, '85. — Lexique de la langue de Mo- 
liere, 3 vols., '96-'97. 

Lomenie (Louis de), 1818-1878. 

Galerie des contemporains illustres, 10 vols., 1840- '47. — Beaumarchais et son 
temps, 2 vols., '55. — Les Mirabeau, 5 vols., '78-'91. — Esquisses historiques 
et litteraires, '79. 

Magnin (Charles), 1793-1862. A critic of romantic leaning. Dramatic 
critic on Globe and later on National. — Librarian at Bibliotheque nationale. — 
Substitutes for Fauriel at Sorbonne, etc. 

Origines du thedtre en Europe, 1838. — Causeries et Meditations, '42. — Thed- 
tre de Hroswitha, '45. — Histoire des marionnettes en Europe, '52, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits con., m, 1843; N.Lundis, v, '63. 

Martha (Constant), 1820-1895. Professor of Latin at Sorbonne froml869. 

De la morale pratique dans les lettres de Seneque, 1854. — Les moralistes sous 
VEmpire romain, '64. — Le poeme de Lucrece, '69. — Etudes morales sur Vanti- 
quite, '83. — La delicatesse dans Vart, '84. — Melanges de litt. ancienne, '96. 

Maurras (Charles-Marie-Photius) , 1868. Has actively defended classi- 
cism against modern laxity and corruption of taste, in such a way, however, as 
to mix up the whole question of classic and romantic art with politics. — Be- 
sides numerous contributions to various newspapers and reviews (especially 
U Action francaise) , and books on social and political questions, has published: 
Jean Moreas, 1891. — Trois Idees politiques : Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte- 
Beuve, '98. — Les amants de Venise, George Sand et Musset, 1902. — L'Avenir de 
V intelligence, '05, etc. 

Merimee (Prosper), 1803-1870. Novelist, archaeologist, etc. 
Melanges historiques et litteraires, 1855. — Portraits historiques et litteraires, 
'75, etc. 

Merlet (Gustave), 1828-1891. Exercised an important influence on numer- 
ous pupils as Professor of " Rhetoric " at Lycee Charlemagne and Lycee Louis- 
le-Grand. 

Le realisme et la fantaisie dans la litt., 1861. — Portraits d'hier, etc., '63. — 
Causeries sur les femmes et les livres, '65. — Hommes et livres, '69. — Saint- 
Evremond, etude historique, morale et litteraire, '70. — Etudes litteraires sur les 
classiques fr., '75. — Etudes litteraires sur les classiques fr. (XVII- XVI II e 
siecles), '76. — Tableau de la litt. fr. (1800-'15), 3 vols., '77-80. —Etudes lit- 
teraires sur la Chanson de Roland, '82. — Etudes litteraires sur les grands classi- 
ques latins, '84. — Etudes litteraires sur les grands classiques grecs, '85. — An- 
thologie classique des poetes du XIX e siecle, '90. 

Mezieres (Alfred), 1826. Professor at Sorbonne from 1863. — Member of 
Academy from 1874. 

Shakespeare, ses auvres et ses critiques, 1861. — Les contemporains de 
Shakespeare, '63. — Predecesseurs et contemporains de Shakespeare, '63. — 
Contemporains et successeurs de Shakespeare, '64. — Dante et Vltalie, '65. — 



LIST OF CRITICS 409 

Pitrarque, '67. — Lasociitifr. Le paysan, etc., '69. — Goethe. Les centres expliqvees 
par la vie, 2 vols., 72-73. — Discours de reception, 75. — En France : XVIII e et 
XIX e siecles, '83. — R&ponse de M. Mezieres au discours de Pierre Loti, '92. — 
Moris et vivants, '97. — Au temps passe", '06. — Hommes et femmes d'hier et 
d'avant-hier, '09. — De Tout un peu, '09, etc. 

Michiels (Alfred- Joseph-Xavier) , 1813-1892. Art critic, historian, etc. 
An enemy of Sainte-Beuve. 

Etudes sur V Allemagne, 2 vols., 1839. — Histoire des idees litteraires en France 
au XIX* siecle, etc., 2 vols., '42. — Souvenirs d' Angleterre, '44. — Le monde 
du comique et du rire, '87, etc. 

Monod (Gabriel), 1844. Historian; Professor at College de France, etc. 

Jules Michelet, 1875. — Les maitres de Vhistoire. Renan, Taine, Michelet, '94. 

— Portraits et souvenirs, '97. — Gaston Paris, 1903, etc. 

Montegut (Emile), 1826-1895. Historian, moralist, critic. — Succeeds 
Gustave Planche on Revue des Deux Mondes (his first article was on Emerson). 
One of the chief interpreters of foreign (especially English) literature to the 
French public during the second half of the 19th century, and a critic of deli- 
cacy and distinction. 

Du genie jr., 1857. — Essai sur Vepoque actuelle, '58. — Poetes et artistes de 
Vltalie, '81. — Types litteraires et fantaisies esthetiques, '82. — Essais sur la litt. 
anglaise, '83. — Nos morts contemporains, 2 vols., '83-'84. — Ecrivains mo- 
dernes de V Angleterre, 3 vols., '85. — Livres et dmes du pays d'Orient, '85. — 
Choses du Nord et du Midi, '86. — Melanges critiques, '87. — Dramaturges et 
romanciers, '90. — Heures de lectures d'un critique, '91. — Esquisses litteraires, 
'93, etc. 

Morice (Charles), 1861. 

Paul Verlaine, 1887. — Demain. Questions d'esthetique, '88. — La litt. de 
tout a I'heure, '89. — Opinions, '95. — Du sens religieux de la poesie. Sur le mot 
poesie. Le principe social de la beaute, '98. — Les textes de Rabelais et la critique 
contemporaine, 1905, etc. 

Musset (Alfred de), 1810-1857. Indulged in satire occasionally at the ex- 
pense of his fellow romanticists especially in the Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet. 

Nettement (Alf red-Francois) , 1805-1869. Strongly reactionary in his 
opinions. 

Histoire de la litt. fr. sous la Restauration, 2 vols., 1853. — Histoire de la litt. 
fr. sous le gouvernement de Juillet, 2 vols., '55. — Poetes et artistes contemporains, 
'62. — Le roman contemporain, etc., '64, etc. 

Nisard (Desire) , 1806-1888. Writes for Journal des Debats and other period- 
icals. — " Inspector general " of Education. — Professor at the Sorbonne. — 
Director of Normal School, member of Academy, etc. 

Etudes de maurs et de critique sur les poetes latins de la decadence, 2 vols., 1834. 

— Melanges, '38. — Histoire de la litt. fr., 4 vols., '44-'61. — Etudes sur la Renais- 
sance, '55. — Souvenirs de voyages, '55. — Etudes de critique litteraire, '58. — 
Etudes d'histoire et de litt., '59. — Nouvelles etudes d'histoire et de litt., '64. — 
Melanges d'histoire et de lilt., '68. — Les quatre grands historiens latins, 74. — 
Portraits et eludes d'histoire litteraire, 74. — Renaissance et R6forme, 2 vols., 
77. — Discours academiques et universitaires, '84. — Nouveaux melanges d'his- 
toire et de litt., '86. — Considerations sur la Revolution fr. et Napoleon I, '87. — 
Souvenirs et notes biographiques, 2 vols., '88. — Mgri somnia, '89. — Essais sur 
VGcole romantique, '91. 



410 LIST OF CKITICS 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, m, 1836; Causeries du lundi, 
xv, '64. — Scherer, Etudes sur la litt. contemporaine, i, '63. — Dowden, New 
Studies in Literature, '95. — Mezieres, Pensies choisies de D. Nisard (cen- 
tenaire), '06. 

Ozanam (Alphonse-Frederic) , 1813-1853. Succeeds Fauriel, whose in- 
fluence is very marked upon him, as professor at the Sorbonne (1845). — A dis- 
tinguished student of Dante and an important figure in French Catholicism of 
the 19th century. 

Essai sur la philosophic de Dante, 1838. — Dante et la philosophic catholique au 
XIII e siecle, '39. — Etudes germaniques, 2 vols., '47-'49. — Documents inedits 
pour servir a Vhistoire litteraire de V Italic du VIII e ~XIII e siecles, '50. — (Euvres 
completes, preface par M. Ampere, 11 vols., '62-'65. — Les pokes franciscains en 
Italie au XIII e siecle, 72. 

See Veuillot, Melanges religieux, etc., iv, 1847-'50. — Lacordaire, Frederic 
Ozanam, '57. — Ampere, Melanges d'histoire litteraire et de litt., n, '67. — A. 
Ozanam, Vie de F. Ozanam, '79. — B. Faulquier, F. Ozanam, '03. 

Parigot (Hippolyte), 1861. 

Emile Augier, 1890. — Le thedtre d'hier, '93. — Genie et metier, '94. — Le 
drame d* Alexandre Dumas, '99. — Alexandre Dumas, pere, 1900. — Renan, '09, 
etc. 

Paris (Gaston) , 1839-1903. Perhaps the most eminent of French mediaeval 
philologists, and also a literary critic of distinction. — Professor at College de 
France from 1872; member of Academy from 1896. 

La poSsie du moyen dge, 2 vols., 1885-'95. — Les origines de la poisie lyrique 
en France au moyen dge, '92. — Francois Villon, 1901. — Esquisse historique de 
la litt. jr. du moyen dge, '07, etc. 

Patin (Henri- Joseph- Guillaume), 1793-1876. Professor of Latin at the 
Sorbonne from 1833; member of Academy from 1843. 

Melanges de litt. ancienne et moderne, 1840. — Etudes sur les tragiques grecs, 
3 vols., '41-'43. — Etudes sur la poe"sie latine, 2 vols., '69. — Discours et Me- 
langes litUraires, '76. 

Pellissier (Georges), 1852. 

Traite theorique et historique de versification jr., 1882. — Les icrivains politi- 
ques en France avant la Revolution, '82. — De sexti decimi sceculi in Francia 
artibus poeticis, '83. — La vie et les ceuvres de Du Bartas, '83. — Le mouvement 
litte'raire au XIX e siecle, '89. — Essais de litt. contemporaine, '93. — Nouveaux 
essais de litt. contemporaine, '95. — Morceaux choisis des poetes du XVI e siecle, 
'96. — Etudes de litt. contemporaine, '98. — Le mouvement litteraire contemporain, 
1901. — Precis d'histoire de la litt. fr., '02. — Etudes de litt. et de morale cont., 
'05. — Voltaire philosophe, '08. — Le Realisme du romantisme, '12, etc. 

Petit de Julleville (Louis), 1841-1900. Professor at the Sorbonne. 

Le discours fr. et la dissertation fr., 1868. — L'Ecole d'Athenes au IV e siecle 
apres JSsus-Christ, '68. — Histoire du thedtre en France : les mysteres, '80. — 
Histoire litteraire, 2 vols., '84. — Histoire du thMtre en France : les comSdiens 
en France au moyen dge, '85. — Histoire du thedtre en France : La comedie et 
les maurs en France au moyen dge, '86. — Histoire du tMdtre en France : Re- 
pertoire du thMtre comique en France au moyen dge, '86. : — Le thedtre en France. 
Histoire de la litt. dramatique depuis les origines a nos jours, '89. — General edi- 
tor of Histoire de la litt. et de la langue fr., 8 vols., '96-'99. — Histoire de la litt. 
fr. des origines a nos jours, '99. 



LIST OF CRITICS 411 

Pichot (AmSdee), 1796-1877. Historian, novelist, poet f active as a trans- 
lator of Byron and other English writers. 

Notice sur Walter Scott et ses Merits, 1821. — Essai sur le genie et le caractire 
de Lord Byron, '24. — Voyage historique et littiraire en Angleterre et en Ecosse, 3 
vols., '25, etc. 

Planche (Gustave), 1808-1857. Contributes to Revue des Deux Mondes 
from 1831. — Remarkable for the severity of his judgments on contemporary 
artists and writers with many of whom he was personally intimate. " A critic 
of the very first order," according to Matthew Arnold. The ordinary French 
view is that P. was a sort of critical Alceste — more temperamental than judi- 
cial in his severity. 

Salon de 1831, 1831. — Portraits litteraires, 2 vols., '36. — Nouveaux por- 
traits litteraires, 2 vols., '54. — Etudes sur les arts, '55. — Etudes sur V&cole fr. 
(1881-52). Peinture et sculpture, 2 vols., '55, etc. 

See Michiels, Histoire des ide"es litte'raires, etc., n, 1842. — Montegut, Es- 
quisses litte'raires, '93. 

Pontmartin (Armand de), 1811-1890. A reactionary critic who had some 
lively skirmishes with Sainte-Beuve. The literary satire in Les Jeudis de Ma- 
dame Charbonneau had a " succes de scandale." 

Causeries litteraires, 1854. — Nouveaux causeries litte'raires, '55. — Dernieres 
causeries litteraires, '56. — Causeries du samedi, '57. — Nouvelles causeries du 
samedi, '59. — Dernieres causeries du samedi, '60. — Les semaines litte'raires, '61. 

— Les jeudis de Mme. Charbonneau, '62. — Les nouvelles semaines litte'raires, '63. 
— Les dernieres semaines litteraires, '64. — Nouveaux samedis, 20 vols., '65-'81. 

— Souvenirs d'un vieux critique, 10 vols., '81-'90. — Mes mSmoires : enfance et 
jeunesse, '85. — Mes mimoires : seconde jeunesse, '86. — Episodes litte'raires, '90. 

— Derniers samedis, 3 vols., '91-'92. 

See Veuillot, Melanges religieux, etc., n, 1859. — Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux 
Lundis, n, in, '62. — Bire, Etudes et portraits, '94. 

Prevost-Paradol (Lucien-Anatole), 1829-1870. A comrade of Taine's at 
the Normal School. One of the most brilliant publicists of the Second Empire. 
After years of opposition, he rallied to the Empire and was sent as minister to 
the United States, but committed suicide at Washington on the outbreak of 
the war with Germany. 

Jonathan Swift, 1856. — Essais de politique et de litt., 3 vols., '59-'63. — 
Etude surEtienne de LaBo&tie, '64. — Etudes sur les moralistes fr., '65. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, i, 1861. — Scherer, Etudes sur la litt. 
contemporaine, i, '63; in, '66; iv, '73. — Greard, Prevost-Paradol, '94. — Lettres 
de Prevost-Paradol, '94, etc. 

Remusat (Charles de), 1797-1875. Philosopher, etc. — Contributes to 
Globe from 1824. — Member of Academy, '46. — Minister of Foreign Affairs, 
'71-73. 

AbSlard, 2 vols., 1845. — De la philosophic allemande, '45. — Critiques et 
6tudes litteraires, 2 vols., '47. — Pass6 et present. Melanges, 2 vols., '47. — L' An- 
gleterre au XVIII e siecle, 2 vols., '56. — Bacon, '57. — Channing, '57. — Lord 
Herbert de Cherbury, '74, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires, in, 1847. — Albert, La litt. fr. au XIX e 
sikcle, ii, '85, etc. 

Renan (Ernest) , 1823-1892. — The points of chief interest in Renan's life are 
those that he himself has given in his Souvenirs, — his birth at TrSguier, in 



412 LIST OF CRITICS 

Brittany, his education at the College de Tr6guier, and Saint-Nicolas du Char- 
donnet at Paris, his preparation for the priesthood at the Seminaire d'Issy and 
Saint-Sulpice, his growing skepticism as the result of historical and philological 
research, and his final rupture with Saint-Sulpice and Catholicism (October, 
1845) . — Renan spends the next three years and a half as a tutor in the Pension 
Crouzet, where he makes the acquaintance of Berthelot. — Receives a scientific 
mission from the government and travels for eight months in Italy ('49) ; his 
democratic illusions of '48 disappear, and the world of art is revealed to him. — 
Meets in '50 his sister Henriette, after a ten-years' separation, and has her con- 
stant companionship and counsel during the ten years following. (See Ma 
Soeur Henriette, p. 32 ff) . — Is employed in the department of Oriental MSS. 
at the Bibliotheque Nationale, '51-'60. — Elected to the Academie des Inscrip- 
tions, '56. — Marries in the same year Mademoiselle Scheffer, niece of the 
painter Ary Scheffer. — Goes on a scientific mission to ancient Phoenicia, ac- 
companied by his sister, '60. — They both fall ill of fever in Syria, and Henri- 
ette dies, '61. — Composes during his Eastern trip his Vie de Jesus. — Ap- 
pointed Professor of Hebrew at the College de France ('62), but the government 
first suspends his course, because of his unorthodox attitude, and two years later 
deprives him of his professorship. — Unsuccessful candidate for deputy in the 
electoral district of Meaux, '69. — Travels with Prince Napoleon in Scandina- 
via, '70. — Reinstated in his professorship at the College de France on the fall 
of the Empire, '70. — Elected to the Academy, '78. — President of the Asiatic 
Society, '82. — Administrator of the College de France, '84. — After a long ill- 
ness, borne with great fortitude, Renan dies in his apartment at the College de 
France, October 2, '92. 

L'Avenir de la science, 1848 (published in '90). — Averroeset V Averro'isme and 
De philosophia peripatetica apud Syros, '52. — Histoire generate et systeme 
compare des langues semitiques, '55. — Etudes d'histoire religieuse, '57. — De 
Vorigine du langage, '58. — Essais de morale et de critique, '59. — Translations: 
Le livre de Job, '59; Le Cantique des cantiques, '60. — Ma Soeur Henriette, '62 
(published, '95). — Vie de Jesus, '63. — Various contributions to the Histoire 
litteraire de la France, vols, xxiv to xxxi (especially the Discours sur Vetat des 
beaux-arts en France au XIV e siecle, in vol. xxrv). — Mission de Phenicie, '64. 

— Les Apdtres, '66. — Questions contemporaines, '68. — Saint-Paul, '69. — La 
reforme intellectuelle et morale, '71. — U Antechrist, '73. — Dialogues et frag- 
ments philosophiques, '76. — Les Evangiles, '77. — Melanges d'histoire et de 
voyages, '78. — L'eglise chretienne, '79. — Conferences d'Angleterre, '80. — 
Marc-Aurele, '82. — Translation: VEcclesiaste, '82. — Souvenirs d'enfance et 
de jeunesse, '83. — Nouvelles etudes d'histoire religieuse, '84. — Discours et 
conferences, '87. — Histoire du peuple d 'Israel, 5 vols., '87-'94. — Drames philo- 
sophiques, '88. — Feuilles detachees, '92. — Lettres intimes, '96. — Correspon- 
dance (between Renan and Berthelot), '98. — Cahiers de jeunesse, '06. — Nou- 
veaux cahiers de jeunesse, '07. 

See Scherer, Melanges de critique religieuse, '60; Etudes sur la litt. contem- 
poraine, iv, vn, vin, rx, and x, '63-'95; Melanges d'histoire religieuse, '64. 

— Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, n, '62; vi, '63. — Bourget, Essais de psycho- 
logic contemporaine, '83. — Lemaltre, Les Contemporains, i, '84; rv, '89. — Im- 
pressions de thedtre, i, '89. — A. France, La vie litteraire, i, '89; n, '94. — E. M. 
de Vogu§, Heures d'histoire, '93. — Pellissier, Le Mouvement litteraire au XIX e 
siecle (p. 314 ff), '94. — G. Monod, Renan, Taine et Michelet, '94. — Seailles, 
Ernest Renan, '95. — F. Espinasse, Life of Renan, 95. — Brunetiere, Nou- 




LIST OF CRITICS 413 

veaux essais sur la litt. contemporaine', '95; Library of the World's Best Literature, 
xxi, '97. 

Renard (Georges), 1847. 

Vie de Voltaire, 1883. — Etudes sur la France contemporaine, '88. — Lea 
princes de la jeune critique, '90. — Critique de combat, 3 vols., '94-'97. — La 
methode scientifique de Vhistoire UtUraire, 1900, etc. 

Rigault (Hippolyte), 1821-1858. 

La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, '56. — CEuvres completes, 4 vols., '59. 

Rod (Edouard), 1857-1910. Novelist, etc. 

De la litt. comparee, 1886. — Etudes sur le XI X e siecle, '88. — Les idees mo- 
rales du temps present, '91. — Dante, '91. — Stendhal, '91. — Essai sur Goethe, 
'98. — Nouvelles etudes sur le XIX e siecle, '98. — L' Affaire J. -J. Rousseau, 
1906. — La Pensee d'Edouard Rod, '11, etc. 

Sacy (Samuel-Ustazade-Silvestre de), 1801-1879. Contributor of lit- 
erary and political articles to Journal des Debats from 1828. — Member of Aca- 
demy from 1854. — An attractive mixture of humanist and bibliophile. 

Varietes litteraires, morales et historiques, 2 vols., 1858. — Rapport sur le 
progres des lettres, par de Sacy, Feval, Gautier, etEd. Thierry, '68. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, xiv, 1858. — Renan, Essais de mor- 
ale et de critique, '59. — Prevost-Paradol, Essais de politique et de litt., in, '63. 
— Taine, Nouveaux essais de critique et d'histoire, '65; Derniers essais de 
critique et d'histoire, '94. — Scherer, Etudes critiques sur la litt. contemporaine, 
vii, '82. 

Sainte-Beuve (Charles-Augustin) , 1804-1869. Born at Boulogne-sur- 
Mer two months after the death of his father, a government official, who at the 
age of fifty-two married a woman of forty (English on her mother's side) . — 
S.-B. studies at Bleriot Institution at Boulogne. — In 1818 enters the Pension 
Landry at Paris. — Studies, medicine, '23-'27. — Begins to write for Globe 
(founded by his old teacher, M. Dubois, '24). — As a result of his review of 
Odes et Ballades in the Globe (Jan., '27) gets acquainted with Hugo. — Rehabi- 
litates Ronsard and the Pleiade as a part of his pro-romantic campaign. — Be- 
gins writing for Revue de Paris. — Has close relations with followers of Saint- 
Simon, '30-'31. — Writes for National; for newly founded Revue des Deux 
Mondes. — Goes to Switzerland. — Meets Vinet and lectures at Lausanne on 
Port-Royal, '37-' 38. — Appointed by Cousin to a position in the Bibliotheque 
Mazarine, '40. — Elected to Academy, '44. — Leaves Paris after the Revolu- 
tion of '48 and spends a year as professor of French literature at Liege, Bel- 
gium. (For circumstances see preface to his Chateaubriand.) — On return to 
Paris (Sept., '49) , begins his Lundis in the Constitutionnel. — Passes over to the 
Moniteur, '53. — Appointed professor of Latin poetry at the College de France, 
'54; but is prevented by students, incensed at his political attitude, from giv- 
ing more than two lectures. — Lectures at the Normal School, '58-'61. — Re- 
turns to the Constitutionnel and begins the Nouveaux lundis, '61. — Appointed 
senator, '65. 

Tableau historique et critique de la poesie fr. et du thedtre fr. au XVI e siecle, 
1828 (definitive ed., '76). — CEuvres choisies de Pierre de Ronsard avec notices, 
notes, et commentaires, '28. — Vie, poesie et pensees de Joseph Delorme, '29. — 
Les Consolations, '30. — Volupte", 2 vols., '34. — Pensees d ' 'Aout, '37. — Port- 
Royal, 5 vols., '40-'59 (3 d ed., 7 vols., '69-'71). — Livre d'amour, '43. — Cau- 
series du lundi, 16 vols., '51-'62 (3 d ed., revised, '57-'72). — Etude sur Virgile, 



414 LIST OF CRITICS 

'57 (revised ed., '70). — Chateaubriand et son groupe litte'raire sous V Empire, 
2 vols., '60 (revised ed., 73). — Portraits litte'raires, 3 vols., '62-64. — Nou- 
veaux lundis, 13 vols., '63-70 (2 d ed., revised, '64-78.) — Portraits contempo- 
rains, 5 vols., '69-71. — Portraits de femmes, 70. — P.-J. Proudhon, sa vie et 
sa correspondance, 72. — Lettres a la princesse, 73. — Premiers lundis, 3 vols., 
74-75. — Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve, 76. — Chroniques parisiennes, 76. — Cor- 
respondance de Sainte-Beuve, 2 vols., 77-78. — Nouvelle Correspondance, '80. 

— Lettres inedites de Sainte-Beuve a Collombet, 1903. — Correspondance in&diU 
de Sainte-Beuve avec M. et Mme. Juste Olivier, '04. — Lettres de Sainte-Beuve a 
Victor Hugo et a Mme. Victor Hugo, Revue de Paris, Dec., Jan. and Feb., '05. 
— Lettres inedites a Charles Labitte, '12. 

See Scherer, Etudes sur la litt. contemporaine, 1, 1863; rv, 73; vn, '82. — Haus- 
eonville, Sainte-Beuve, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 75. — Levallois, Sainte-Beuve, 72. 

— Troubat, Souvenirs et Indiscretions du dernier secretaire de Sainte-Beuve, '72; 
Vie de Sainte-Beuve, 76; Souvenirs du dernier secretaire de Sainte-Beuve, '90. 

— M. Arnold, in Encyclopaedia Britannica. — Brunetiere, L 'evolution des 
genres, '90. — Taine, Derniers essais de critique et d'histoire, '94. — Faguet, Po- 
litiques et Moralistes du XIX e siecle, 3d series, '99. — Spoelberch de Loven- 
joul, Sainte-Beuve inconnu, 1901. — Giraud, Table alphabe'tique et analytique 
des Premiers lundis, etc., avec une etude sur Sainte-Beuve et son azuvre critique, '03. 

— Michaut, Sainte-Beuve avant les Lundis, '03; Le Livre d' Amour de Sainte- 
Beuve, '05; Etudes sur Sainte-Beuve, '05. — Seche, Etudes d'histoire roman- 
tique: Sainte-Beuve, 2 vols., '04. — G. M. Harper, Sainte-Beuve, '09. — P. E. 
More, Shelburne Essays, 3d series, '06. — F. Voizard, Sainte-Beuve: L'homme et 
I'auvre, '12. 

Saint-Marc Girardin, 1801-1873. Exercised a wide influence as professor 
of French poetry at the Sorbonne from 1834. — Member of Academy from 
1844. — A keen and witty opponent of romantic extravagance; a moralist even 
more than a literary critic. He has been accused of having a somewhat bour- 
geois mental habit, and of being a brilliant improviser even more than a born 
writer (an " ecrivain de race " as the French say). 

Eloge de Lesage, 1822. — Eloge de Bossuet, '27. — Tableau de la litt. fr. au 
XVI e sie*cle, '28. — Notices litteraires et politiques sur V Allemagne, '34. — Cours de 
litt. dramatique, 4 vols., '43. — Essais de litt. et de morale, 2 vols., '45. — Souvenirs 
de voyages etd'itudes, 2 vols., '52-'53. — La Fontaine et les fabulistes, 2 vols., '67. 

— J. -J. Rousseau, sa vie et ses ouvrages, 2 vols., 70. 

See Vinet, Etudes sur la litt. fr., in, 1851. — Nisard, Etudes de critique lit- 
Uraire, '58; Portraits et itudes d'histoire litteraire, 74; Souvenirs et notes bio- 
graphiques, '88. 

Saint-Victor (le comte Paul de), 1827-1881. A romanticist whose style 
was admired by Taine and others for its warmth of coloring, a merit that does 
not compensate for its lack of intellectual content. 

Hommes et dieux, 1867. — Les femmes de Goethe, '69. — Lamartine, '69. — 
Victor Hugo, '85. — Anciens et modemes, '86. — Le thedtre contemporain, '89. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, x, 1867. — Scherer, Etudes critiques sur 
la litt. contemporaine, iv, 73; vn, '82. — Taine, Derniers essais de critique et 
d'histoire, '94. 

Sand (George) , 1804-1876. For her critical views see her Souvenirs et impres- 
sions litteraires, 1862. — Impressions et Souvenirs, 73. — Questions d' art et de litt., 
78. — Correspondance, 6 vols., '82-84 (especially the letters to Flaubert), etc. 



LIST OF CRITICS 415 

Sarcey (Francisque) , 1828-1899. The most influential dramatic critic of 
his time. Writer for the Temps newspaper from 1867. A technician and advo- 
cate of bourgeois good sense. 

Comidiens et comediennes, '78. — Souvenirs de jeunesse, '84. — Souvenir* 
d'dge mur, '92. — Quarante aus de thedtre, 8 vols., 1900-'02, etc. 

See Lemaltre, Les Contemporains, n, '89. — Faguet, Propos de thSdtre, '03. 

Sayous (AndrS), 1808-1870. 

Etude litteraire sur Calvin, 1839. — Etudes litteraires sur les icrivains fr. de 
la Reformation, 2 vols., '42. — Histoire de la litt. fr. a Vetranger, 2 vols., '53. — 
Le XVIII e siecle a Vetranger, 2 vols., '61. 

See Vinet, Etudes sur la litt. fr., in, 1851. — S. de Sacy, Varies litteraires, I, 
ii, '58. — Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, xv, '61. 

Scherer, (Edmond), 1815-1889. Born at Paris of Swiss, Dutch and Eng- 
lish ancestry. — Boards at Monmouth, England, with an evangelical clergy- 
man from Aug. 10, 1831. — Returns to Paris, '33. — Theological student Stras- 
bourg, '36-'39. — Teaches at Ecole libre de Theologie, Geneva. — Resigns from 
the School, Dec, '49. — Gives independent courses on theology at Geneva, 
'50-'59. — Leaves for Paris, '60. — Joins the staff of the Temps newspaper, for 
which it is estimated he wrote 3500 articles. — Elected member of National 
Assembly, '71. — Elected to Senate, '75. 

Dogmatique de V ecole reformee, 1843. — De Vital actuel de Veglise riforntee en 
France, '44. — Esquisse d'une theorie de Veglise chretienne, '45. — La critique et 
lafoi, '50. — Alex. Vinet, '53. — Lettres a mon cure, '53. — Melanges de critique 
religieuse, '60. — Etudes critiques sur la litt. contemporaine, 10 vols., '63-'95. 
— Melanges d' histoire religieuse, '64. — Diderot, '80. — La revision de la con- 
stitution, '81. — La democratic et la France,' 83. — Melchior Grimm, '87. — Etudes 
sur la litt. au XVI I I e siecle, '91. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, xv, 1860. — Greard, Ed. Scherer, '90. — 
Tissot, Les evolutions de la critique, '90. — Dowden, New Studies in Literature, 
'95. — Boutmy, Taine, Scherer, Laboulaye, 1901. 

Seche (Leon), 1848. Ultra-biographical in his point of view. 

Port-Royal des Champs, lS99. — Volney {1757-1820), '99. — Sainte-Beuve, 
2 vols., 1904-05. — A. de Mussel, '07. — Le Cenacle de la " Muse frangaise," 
'08. — Hortense Allart de Meritens, '08. — Le Roman de Lamartine, '09. — 
Madame d'Arbouville, '09. — Muses romantiques, '10. — La Jeunesse dorie 
sous Louis Philippe, '11. — Le Cenacle de Joseph Delorme, 2 vols., '12, etc. 

Seilliere (Ernest), 1866. Is developing the relationship between the ex- 
pansive, romantic attitude towards life and imperialism {La Philosophic de 
Vimperialisme) . 

Etudes sur Ferdinand Las salle, 1897. — Litt. et morale dans le parti socialiste 
allemand, '98. — Le comte deGobineau et Varyanisme historique, 1903. — Apol- 
lon ou Dionysos? '05. — L'imperialisme democratique, '07. — Le mal romantique. 
Essai sur Vimperialisme irrationnel, '08. — Une tragedie d 'amour au temps du 
romantisme, '09. — Introduction a la philosophic de Vimperialisme, '10. — 
Barbey d' Aur evilly, '10. — Les mystiques du neo-romantisme, '11. — Schopenhauer, 
'11, etc. 

Simonde de Sismondi (Jean-Charles-Leonard), 1773-1842. Historian, 
etc. ; an intimate of Madame de Stael's. — His work De la litt. du Midi de VEu- 
rope (4 vols., 1813) is an underlying influence on the romantic movement. Like 
Madame de Stael he has little sense of form. 



416 LIST OF CRITICS 

See Sainte-BeuveJ Nouveaux lundis', vi,' 1863. — Schereri Etudes critiques 
sur la litt. contemporaine, n, '65. 

Stael, Mme. de (nee Germaine Necker), 1766-1817. Only child of 
rich Swiss banker, Necker, minister of Louis XVI, etc. — Meets in her mo- 
ther's drawing-room La Harpe, Buffon, etc. Marries Baron de Stael, Swedish 
Ambassador at Paris, 1786. — Joins Talleyrand and other friends in England 
during the Revolution. — Meets Benjamin Constant, Sept., '94. — Opens 
salon at Paris, May, '95, but returns to Coppet same year. — Opens salon 
again, April, '97. — Enters into opposition to Napoleon. — Death of Baron de 
Stael, '02. — Receives order to keep at a distance of forty leagues from Paris, 
Oct., 1803. — Leaves for Germany (at Weimar from Dec, '03, to Feb., '04). 
Appoints A. W. Schlegel tutor to her son, '04. — Returns in haste from Ger- 
many on learning of the death of her father. — Sets out for Italy, Nov., '04. — 
Spends winter '07-'08 at Munich and Vienna. — Confiscation of French edi- 
tion of the Germany, '10 (printed at London, '13, and at Leipzig, '14). — 
Marries Genevan officer of twenty-three, named de Rocca, '11. — Persecuted 
by Napoleon, she flees from Coppet, May 22, '12. — Reaches Russia by way of 
Vienna and Warsaw. — Visits Sweden and later England (June, '13). — 
Stricken with paralysis at a ball, Feb., '17, and dies July 14, of the same year. 
Lettres sur le caractere et les ecrits de J. -J. Rousseau, 1788. — Essai sur les fic- 
tions, '95. — De Vinfluence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des na- 
tions, '96. — De la litt. consideree dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 
2 vols., 1800. — Delphine, 4 vols., '02. — Corinne, 3 vols., '07. — De VAlle- 
magne, 3 vols., '10. — Reflexions sur le suicide, '13. — Considerations sur la 
Revolution fr., 3 vols., '18. — Dix annSes d'exil, '21. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 1835. — Brandes, Emigrant litera- 
ture, '82. — Lady Blennerhassett, Frau von Stael (French and English trans- 
lations) , '87. — Pellissier, Le mouvement litteraire au XIX e siecle, '89. — 
Brunetiere, Etudes de critique sur la litt. fr., iv, '90.; U evolution des genres, '90.; 
L' evolution de la poesie lyrique, '95. — Dejob, M me. de Stael et Vltalie, '90. — 
Sorel, Mme. de Stael, '90. — Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du XIX e siecle, 
i, '91. — Doumic, Hommes et idees du XIX e siecle, 1903. 

Stapfer (Paul), 1840. 

Petite comedie de la critique litteraire, ou Moliere selon les trois ecoles philo- 
sophiques, 1865. — Laurence Sterne, '70. — Les artistes juges et parties, '72. — 
Shakespeare et Vantiquite, 2 vols., '79. — Etudes sur la litt. fr. moderne et con- 
temporaine, '80. — Moliere et Shakespeare, '80. — Goethe et ses deux chefs-d'oeuvre 
classiques, '81. — Varietes litte'raires et morales, '81. — Racine et V. Hugo, '86. 
— Rabelais, '89. — Les reputations litteraires, '93. — Montaigne, '94. — La 
famille et les amis de Montaigne, '95. — La grande predication chretienne en 
France, '98. — «- Paradoxes et truismes d'un ancien doyen, 1904. — Humour et 
humoristes, '11, etc. 

Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 1783-1842. Important as an underlying influ- 
ence on writers like Taine and Bourget rather than for his specific opinions on 
literature. His definition of romanticism in Racine et Shakespeare is impossible. 
It would follow from this definition, as M. Faguet points out, that the most un- 
romantic of writers are the romanticists of 1830. The argument against the 
unities in the same book coincides with that of Dr. Johnson in his Preface to 
Shakespeare. 

Racine et Shakespeare, 1823. — Melanges Wart et de litt,, '67, etc. 



LIST OF CRITICS 417 

See A. Paupe, Hist, des centres de Stendhal, 1904. — J. M61ia, Les JOAes de 
Stendhal, '10. 

Taillandier (Rene-Gaspard-Ernest), known as Saint-Rene Taillandier, 
1817-79. Contributed articles for many years, chiefly on foreign literatures, 
to Revue des Deux Mondes. 

Novalis, 1847. — Histoire de la jeune Allemagne. Etudes litter aires, '49. — 
Poete du Caucase : Michel Lermontoff, '56. — Litt. btrangere, '61. — Lettres in- 
cites de J. C. S. de Sismondi, '63. — Corneille et ses contemporains, '64. — 
Drames et romans de la vie litteraire, '70. — Introduction aux fables de La Fon- 
taine, '73. — Les destinies de la nouvelle poisie provencale, '76. — Etudes littt- 
raires, '81, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, v, 1863. — Montegut, Nos morts con- 
temporains, '89. 

Taine (Hippolyte- Adolphe) , 1828-1893. Studies at College Bourbon and 
Ecole normale, 1841-'51. — Incurs displeasure of Government because of his 
determinist doctrines, and is forced to give up his position as teacher in Lycee 
at Poitiers, '52. — Receives doctor's degree, '53. — Attains notoriety by his 
attack in Philosophes francais au XIX e siecle on the official philosophy of 
Cousin, '57. — Becomes professor at Ecole des beaux-arts, '64. — Marriage, 
'68. — Lectures at Oxford, '71. — Elected to the Academy, '78. 

De Personis platonicis and Essai sur les fables deLa Fontaine, theses presented 
for doctorate, 1853 (the latter recast and published under the title La Fontaine 
et ses fables, '60). — Voyage aux Pyrenees, '55. — Essai sur Tite-Live, '56. — 
Philosophes francais au XIX e siecle, '57 (revised edition under title Les philo- 
sophes classiques au XIX e siecle en France, '68). — Essais de critique et d'his- 
toire, '58. — Histoire de la litterature anglaise, 5 vols., '63-'67. — Nouveaux 
essais de critique et d'histoire, '65. — Voyage en Italie, 2 vols., '66. — Philoso- 
phic deVart, '65; Philosophic de Vart en Italie, '66; VIdSaldans Vart, '67; Philo- 
sophie de Vart dans les Pays-Bas, '68; Philosophie de Vart en Grece, '69 (last five 
volumes united into two, under general title, Philosophie de Vart, '80). — Vie 
et opinions de Thomas Graindorge, '68. — De V intelligence, 2 vols., '70. — Du Suf- 
frage universal, '71. — Notes sur V Angleterre, '72. — Un sejour en France, 
1792-1795, '72. — Origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols., '76-'93. — 
Derniers essais de critique et d'histoire, '94. — Garnet de voyage, '96. — Vie et cor- 
respondance, 4 vols., 1903-'07. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, xm, 1857; Nouveaux lundis, vin, 
'64. — Scherer, Melanges de critique religieuse, '58; Etudes, iv, '66; vi, vn, 
'78; vin, '84. — Montegut, Essais sur la litt. anglaise, '63. — Caro, Uldee de 
Dieu et ses nouveaux critiques, '64. — Bourget, Essais de psychologie contem- 
poraine, '83. — Hennequin, La critique scientifique, '88. — Brunetiere, V Evolu- 
tion de la critique, '90. — Monod, Renan, Taine et Michelet, '94. — A. de Mar- 
gerie, H. Taine, '94. — G. Barzellotti, Ippolito Taine, '95 (French translation 
by Dietrich, 1901). — Pellissier, Nouveaux essais de litt. contemporaine, '95. — 
Giraud, Essai sur Taine, 1901 ; Bibliographic des ceuvres de Taine, '02. — 
Aulard, Taine historien de la Revolution, '07. 

Texte (Joseph), 1865-1900. 

J. -J. Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme litteraire, '95. — Etudes de 
litt. europeenne, '98. 

Veuillot (Louis), 1813-1883. A writer who put an extraordinary gift for 
expression (manifested especially in satire and invective) into the service of a 



418 LIST OF CRITICS 

very ultramontane type of Catholicism. His organ was the newspaper 
L'Univers (suppressed, 1860-'67). 

Melanges religieux, historiques, politiques et litteraires, 18 vols., 1856-'75. 

— Les odeurs de Paris, '66. — Moliere et Bourdaloue, '77. — Etudes sur V. Hugo, 
'85, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, i, 1861. — Scherer, Etudes, i '63.; iv, '74. 

— Lemaitre, Les contemporains, 6 e serie, '96. 

Villemain (Abel-Fran$ois) , 1790-1870. Maitre de conferences at Normal 
School, 1810. — Professor at the Sorbonne from '16. — Succeeds Fontanes at 
Academy, '21. — Becomes active politically. — Villele Ministry suspends his 
course at the Sorbonne, '21. — Prominent politically during July Monarchy. — 
Minister of Education, '39-'44. 

Eloge de Montaigne, 1812. — Choix d'oraisons funebres, '13. — Discours sur 
les avantages et les inconvenients de la critique, '14. — Eloge de Montesquieu, '16. 

— Essai sur les romanciers grecs, '22. — Discours et melanges litteraires, '23. 
Nouveaux melanges historiques et litteraires, 27. — Cours de Hit. jr., 6 vols., '28. 

— Considerations sur la langue jr., '35. — (Euvres, 10 vols., '40-'49. — Cours de 
litt. fr. : Le tableau de la litt. jr. au XVI I I e siecle et du moyen-dge en France, en 
Italie, enEspagne et en Angleterre, 6 vols., '40-'46. — Etudes de litt. ancienne et 
itrangere, '46. — Discours et melanges litteraires, '46. — Tableau de V eloquence 
chretienne au TV* siecle, 49. — Souvenirs contemporains d'histoire et de litt., 2 
vols., '53-'55. — Choix d 'etudes sur la litt. contemporaine, '57. — La tribune 
moderne, '58. — Essai sur le genie de Pindare et sur la poesie lyrique, '59, etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, n, '36. — Causeries du lundi, i, 
'49; vi, '52. — Nisard, Etudes d'histoire et de litt., '59. — Renan, Discours et 
conferences, '87. — Brunetiere, L 'evolution de la critique, '90. 

Vinet (Alexandre-Rodolphe), 1797-1847. Professor of French literature 
at Basle from 1817-37; professor of theology at Lausanne, '37-'45. — A mor- 
alist and critic of rare insight and elevation. — Exercised a marked influence 
on men so different as Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Brunetiere, 
etc. — The form of his work is inferior to the substance, an inferiority that 
may militate against its survival. " Le style," says Sainte-Beuve, " est un 
sceptre d'or a qui reste, en definitive, le royaume de ce monde." 

Chrestomathie fr., 3 vols., 1829. — Etudes sur Pascal, '47. — Etudes sur la litt. 
fr. au XIX* siecle, 3 vols., '49 (vol. I, of a new and more complete ed., '12). 

— Histoire litteraire fr. au XVIII* siecle, 2 vols., '53. — Moralistes des XVI*- 
XVII* siecles, '59. —Esprit & Alex. Vinet, 2 vols., '61. — Poetes du siecle de 

Louis XIV, '62. — Melanges, '69. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, in, 1837; Portraits litteraires, 
in, '47. — Scherer, A. Vinet. Notice sur sa vie et ses ecrits, '53; Etudes, i, 
'63. — Rambert, A. Vinet, sa vie et son ceuvre, '75. — Brunetiere, Essais sur 
la litt. contemporaine, '92. 

Vitet (Ludovic), 1802-1873. Literary critic on Globe from 1824. Later 
distinguished himself as art critic. 

Essais historiques et litteraires, 1862. — Etudes philosophiques et litteraires, '74, 
etc. 

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits litteraires, in, 1846. 

Weiss (J. -J.), 1827-1891. An unsystematic critic, but conservative in his 
general instincts. He had a marked gift for epigram. The title of an article 



LIST OF CRITICS 419 

he published in the Revue contemporaine in 1858 (La Literature brutale) gave 
a phrase to criticism. 

Essai sur Hermann et DorotMe, 1856. — Essai sur Vhistoire de la litt. jr., '65. — 
Au pays du Rhin, '86. — Le thSdtre et les mceurs, '89. — Autour de la Comidie 
Fr., '92. — Sur Goethe, '92. — Le drame historique et le drame passionnel, '94. — 
Trois annees de thSdtre (1883-85), 4 vols., '92-96. 

See Lemaltre, Impressions de thedtre, vn, '91. — De Vogiie\ Regards his- 
toriques et litteraires, '91. — Doumic, Portraits d'ecrivains, '92. — France, La 
vie litteraire, iv, '92. — Pellissier, Essais sur la litt. contemporaine, '93. — E. 
Lovinesco, J.-J. Weiss, 1909. — G. Stirbey, J.-J. Weiss, '11. 

Wyzewa (T. de), 1862. Has for many years contributed articles on foreign 
literatures and art to Revue des Deux Mondes. 

Nos mattres, 1895. — Ecrivains etrangers, 3 vols.,'96-'99, etc. 

Zola (Emile), 1840-1903. Defends for the most part in his critical writing 
his own conception of the novel (a conception that involves a radical confusion 
of the genres) . 

Mes haines, 1866. — Le roman experimental, '80. — Le naturalisme au thSdtre, 
'81. — Nos auteurs dramatiques, [81. — Les romanciers naturalistes, '81. — 
Documents litteraires, '81. 



INDEX OF NAMES 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Adams, John, 244. 

Addison, 157. 

^Elian, 351. 

^schylus, 166. 

Agathon, 385 n. 

Albany, Countess of, 110. 

Alexander, 215. 

Amiel, 52 n., 197, 198, 287, 391. 

Ampere, J.-J., 94, 95, 172. 

Anne, Queen, 159. 

Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 188, 317. 

Aristophanes, 346. 

Aristotle, 25, 52, 54, 57, 126, 227, 303, 

326, 352 n., 365, 371, 372, 373, 381. 
Arnauld, 154. 
Arnold, Matthew, vii, 35, 52 n., 66 n., 

104, 197, 198, 199, 213, 248, 272, 362, 

387 n. 
Augustine, Saint, 167, 367, 370 n. 

Bacon, 236, 337. 

Balzac, Guez de, 154. 

Balzac, Honore" de, 29, 50, 107, 137, 179, 

181, 182, 220, 221, 223, 229, 301, 306, 

332 3°3 
Barbe', Abbs' Eustache, 103, 104. 
Barres Maurice, 291, 368 n. 
Baudelaire, 119, 209, 210, 212. 
Bayle, Pierre, 112, 121, 122, 123, 124, 

125, 126, 127, 131, 132, 316. 
Beaumont, Mme. de, 43. 
Beethoven, 234. 
B&anger, 104, 105, 173, 279. 
Bergson, Henri, vii, viii, ix, x, 53, 54, 

55, 56, 231, 252, 253, 375. 
Berthelot, Marcellin, 275, 287, 306, 309. 
Bertin, Edouard, 242. 
Bismarck, 27. 
Blackmore, 352. 
Boileau, 3, 24, 63 n., 65, 88, 93 n., 126, 

127, 137, 172, 182, 183, 229, 244, 254, 

303, 325, 338, 340, 380, 381, 389. 
Bossuet, 57, 74, 89, 93, 229, 330, 331. 
Boswell, 349. 
Bouhours, Father, 348. 
Bourget, Paul, 239, 288, 343, 344, 368 n. 
Bowles, Samuel, 61, 65. 



Browne, Sir Thomas, 310. 

Brownell, W. C, 355. 

Brunetiere, 85, 87, 88, 89, 94, 141, 191 n., 

298-337, 345 n., 350, 381. 
Buddha, 55, 369, 370, 371. 
Burke, 339, 347, 360. 
Burns, 302. 
Byron, 2, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 81, 82, 302. 

CaBsar, 134. 

Calderon, 23. 

Calvin, 32, 299. 

Camoens, 23. 

Canova, 154. 

Carlyle, 13, 21 n., 198 n., 258. 

Catullus, 116. 

Cervantes, 163, 254. 

Chamfort, 158. 

Chapman, 302. 

Charlemagne, 215. 

Chateaubriand, 1, 5, 35, 41, 42, 43, 48, 

49, 52 n., 60-78, 79, 82, 96, 104, 107, 

118, 136, 138, 145, 154, 159, 160, 166, 

269, 270, 271, 278, 294, 302, 307, 308, 

316. 
CMtenay, Mme. de, 37. 
Chenier, Andr<5, 308. 
Childeric, 77. 
Christ, 26, 27 (Jesus), 241, 271, 272, 

273, 275, 276, 286. 
Cicero, 57, 114, 134. 
Clovis, 77. 
Colbert, 229. 

Coleridge, 13, 37, 66 n., 245. 
Colle\ 172. 
Collignon, A., 114. 
Comte, Auguste, 195, 224, 304, 331, 

334. 
Conf alonieri, 32 n. 
Conrad, 121, 122. 
Conrart, 85. 

Constant, Benjamin, 81. 
Corneille, Pierre, 38, 57, 153, 185, 249. 
Corneille, Thomas, 249. 
Coulmann, 163. 
Cousin, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 95, 96, 107, 

141, 174. 



424 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Crabbe, 118. 
Cr<*billon, 1, 179. 
Croce, Benedetto, 50, 53. 
Cuvier, 145, 325. 

Dante, 68, 78, 126, 161, 347, 373, 387. 

Danton, 134 n. 

Darwin, 216, 317, 325, 326, 334. 

D'Assoucy, 126. 

Daunou, 99, 102. 

Davidson, Thomas, 355 n. 

Delille, Abbe\ 51. 

De Quincey, 172. 

Descartes, 93, 176, 226, 236. 

Descbamps, Emile, 63 n. 

Diderot, 39, 68. 

Doudan, 206, 271 n. 

Dreyfus, 300, 315, 319. 

Dubois, 100. 

Dugard, Mme., 357 n. 

Du Guet, 148, 152. 

Dussault, 67 n. 

Eekermann, 363, 367 n., 370 n. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 357, 358, 362, 367. 

Emerson, 23, 35, 37, 40, 52, 54, 56, 114, 
150, 161, 165, 172, 174, 186,246,252, 
261, 263, 264, 277, 280, 300, 345, 
346, 351, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 
359, 360, 361, 362, 364, 366, 368, 372, 
374, 375, 381, 388, 389, 390, 391, 
392. 

Epictetus, 376. 

Epicurus, 120, 357. 

Euripides, 75. 

Fagon, 159. 

Faguet, Emile, 60, 72, 121, 122, 126, 

244, 292, 336. 
Fauriel, 33, 99. 
Fenelon, 316. 
Fichte, 13, 31. 
Fielding, 171. 
Flaubert, 140, 255 n., 307. 
Fleury, 272. 

Fontanes, 38 n., 41, 42, 63, 65. 
Fontenelle, 172. 
France, Anatole, 57, 150, 188, 289, 290, 

305, 306, 311, 312, 314, 316-324, 

326, 330, 345, 347, 349, 351. 
Francis, Saint, 322. 
Franck, 123. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 113. 
Fromentin, 206. 



Garat, 176. 

Gautier, 45, 191, 209, 227, 295, 302, 
308, 348, 377. 

Geoffroy, 3, 4. 

Gibbon, 339. 

Gluck, 176. 

Goethe, 2, 20, 21, 65, 72, 73, 80, 81, 88, 
95, 127, 137, 142, 162, 171, 174, 213, 
214, 239, 242, 265, 291, 306,312, 341, 
353, 361, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 
370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 377, 378, 379, 
381. 

Goncourt, the brothers, 105, 123, 140, 
190, 191, (Edmond) 306, 307. 

Gorgias, 290. 

Gray, 143, 144. 

Greard, 192, 197, 202, 322. 

Green, John Richard, 342. 

Grillparzer, 30. 

Guizot, 82, 83, 87, 96, 154, 225, 226. 

Haeckel, 325. 

Hamilton, 144, 160. 

Harnack, Otto, 367 n. 

Harrison, J. S., 355 n. 

Haussonville, Comte d', 100. 

Hauvette, Henri, 301 n. 

Haywood, 170. 

Hazlitt, 52, 170. 

Hegel, 83, 120, 192, 193, 216, 224, 225, 

281 n., 317. 
Heine, 12, 13, 341. 
Herder, 22, 33, 281 n. 
Herodotus, 268. 
Herrick, 116. 
Holmes, O. W., 370. 
Homer, vii, 11, 68, 73, 74, 144, 184, 

185, 266, 352. 
Horace, 25, 112, 116, 117, 121, 137, 143, 

144 244 254. 
Hugo,' 32, 45, 67, 73, 75, 79, 80, 91, 92, 

93, 95, 98, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 136, 

137, 180, 209, 243, 295, 307, 321,332, 

341, 377. 
Hugo, Mme., 105. 
Hurd, Bishop, 227. 
Huret, Jules, 293, n. 
Hutchinson, Colonel, 343. 
Huysmans, 314. 

James, William, ix, 53, 253, 254. 

Janin, Jules, 91. 

Jeffrey, 4. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, x, 96, 169, 227, 



INDEX OF NAMES 



425 



230, 266, 303, 339, 340, 349, 370, 

371. 
Jonaon, Ben, 168. 
Joubert, x, 8, 34-59, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 

74, 196, 199, 293, 312, 321, 331, 355, 

356, 375, 378, 381. 
Jouffroy, 315. 
Jouy, 121. 
Jurieu, Mme., 122. 
Jussieu, 145. 

Kant, 13, 43. 
Keats, 161, 375. 
Kotzebue, 352. 

La Bruyere, 110, 111, 152. 

La Fontaine, 20, 52 n., 179, 183, 185. 

La Harpe, 3, 11, 51, 85, 153. 

Lamarck, 102. 

Lamartine, 131, 136, 159, 160, 199, 208, 

233 341. 
Lamb', Cbarles, 36, 52, 170, 332. 
Lamennais, 102, 106, 107, 315. 
Lanson, Gustave, 380 n., 384, 385, 

386. 
La Rochefoucauld, 53, 109, 110, 111, 

132, 152, 156, 173, 212. 
Lasserre, Pierre, 381. 
Lazarus, 275. 
Le Bossu, 65. 
Leconte de Lisle, 318. 
Leguay, Pierre, 385 n. 
Leibnitz, 365. 
Lemaitre, Jules, 52, 62, 64, 125 n., 138, 

150, 302, 306, 311-316, 320, 321, 

323, 324, 326, 331, 350 n. 
Le Maitre, 152. 
Lemereier, 2. 
Lenclos, Ninon de, 336. 
Leo XIII, 334. 
Lerminier, 103 n. 
Lerins, Saint Vincent de, 334. 
Lesage, 39, 86. 
Lessing, 302. 
Le Tourneux, 177. 
Levallois, J., 105 n. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 351. 
Livy, 57, 228, 267, 268. 
Longinus, 165, 352 n. 
Longueville, Mme. de, 84. 
Louis XI, 233. 
Louis XIV, 10, 15, 57, 68, 86, 89, 152, 

159, 182, 264, 338. 
Lucan, 57- 



Lucian, 185. 
Lucretius, 120, 260. 
Lycophron, 290. 

Machiavelli, 38. 

Macpherson, 266. 

Magnin, 158. 

Magny, 123, 140, 190. 

Maigron, 81 n. 

Maine, due du, 152. 

Maintenon, Mme. de, 152, 159. 

Maistre, J. de, 172. 

Malherbe, 325, 340. 

Malebranche, 172, 176, 228, 262. 

Mallarm<5, 304. 

Manzoni, 33. 

Marcus Aurelius, 134, 241, 251, 276. 

Martial, 116. 

Martineau, Harriet, 269. 

Mary Magdalene, 275. 

Mary Stuart, 278. 

Mathilde, Princesse, 245. 

Maurras, Charles, 368 n. 

Meilhan, Senac de, 149. 

Merlet, G., 2 n., 61. 

Meissonier, 143. 

Michael Angelo, 55. 

Michaud, 158. 

Miehelet, 77, 181, 223, 231, 243. 

Mill, John Stuart, 224. 

Milsand, 272 n. 

Milton, 51, 68, 73, 74, 75, 213, 343. 

Mole, 49, 172. 

Moliere,89, 133, 134, 178, 183, 184, 191, 

213, 236, 263, 336. 
Montaigne, 89, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 

121, 172, 176, 184, 298, 316. 
Montegut, 206. 
Montesquieu, 38. 
More, Paul E., 357 n. 
Morley, John, 134. 
Musset, Alfred de, 223, 224, 242, 270 n., 

341. 

Napoleon, 5, 8, 9, 12, 18, 129, (Bona- 
parte) 167, 214, 215, 245, 384. 
Necker, 8. 
Nero, 273, 294. 
Newman, Cardinal, 334, 388. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 169. 
Nicolardot, 347. 
Nicole, 148, 158. 

Nisard, 87-95, 99, 136, 172, 325. 
Nordau, Max, 378. 



426 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Ohnet, G., 323. 
Ossian, 11, 12, 266. 

Paillet, 179. 

Palgrave 342. 

Pantasides, 101. 

Paris, Paulin, 142. 

Patin, Guy, 121. 

Pascal, 53, 85, 111, 112, 115, 127, 135, 

152, 174, 219, 239, 240, 241, 287 n., 

296, 299, 313, 315, 330, 331, 361, 367. 
Pater, Walter, 118, 155, 321, 322, 323, 

350. 
Paul, Saint, 26, 27, 274, 275, 277. 
Peacock, 158. 
Peckins, 126. 
Pelagius, 274. 
Pellissier, 345 n. 
Pericles, 247, 264. 
Perrault, 172. 

Petit de Julleville, 32 n., 80 n. 
Petrarch, 179. 
Petronius, 144, 160, 
Piron, 179, 182. 
Pius IX, 272. 
Plato, ix, x, 34, 46, 52 n., 54, 57, 211, 

253, 302, 355, 358, 371, 372, 376. 
Pliny, 185. 
Plutarch, 184. 
Poe, 172. 
Pollock, 352. 

Pope, 61, 65, 168, 169, 178. 
Pradon, 126. 
Prevost, Abbe\ 86. 
Protagoras, 382, 383. 
Proudhon, 133. 
Prudhomme, Sully, 27. 

Quinault, 172. 

Racine, 57, 63, 75, 126, 153, 175, 178, 

183, 212, 316, 338, 350. 
Raynal, Paul de, 8 n., 34 n. 
Raynal, Abbe", 68. 
Rdcamier, Mme, 100, 159, 278. 
Renan, 6, 26, 27, 125 n., 131, 140, 173, 

190, 216, 220, 243, 257-297, 304, 

305, 314, 315, 317, 319, 323, 339, 378, 

379 
Renan, Henriette, 286, 295. 
Retz, Cardinal de, 152. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 339. 
Richardson, 171. 
Richelieu, Cardinal de, 154, 167. 



Rivarol, 347. 

Robespierre, 244, 296, 336. 

Robinson, Crabb, 20. 

Ronsard, 88. 

Rothschild, 272. 

Rousseau, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 22, 
30, 34, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 60, 61, 
64, 67, 68, 71, 81, 90, 91, 115, 164, 
169, 172, 252, 294, 302, 307, 310, 316, 
329, 336, 344, 345, 355, 356,357,359. 

Ruskin, 70, 71, 76, 198 n. 

Saci, Lemaitre de, 148, 152. 

Sacy, Sylvestre de, 295 n. 

Sade, Marquis de, 210. 

Sainte-Beuve, vii, xi, 3, 14 n., 17, 20, 
33, 35, 36, 38, 41, 45, 49, 50, 52 n, 62, 
68, 71, 73, 75, 80, 84, 86, 93, 94, 95, 
96, 97-188, 190, 200, 201. 202, 218, 
219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 228, 231, 232, 
246, 250, 255, 256, 257, 259, 263, 266, 
270, 273, 277, 278, 281, 287 n., 292, 
300, 301, 303, 313, 317, 324, 331, 332, 
340, 347, 351, 354, 363, 364, 367, 369, 
379, 380, 384, 389, 390, 391, 392. 

Saint-Cyran, 152. 

Saint-Evremond, 10, 11, 154, 316. 

Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy, 325. 

Saint-Pierre, B. de, 48. 

Saint-Simon, 159. 

Saisset, 226. 

Salomon, Ch., 385 n. 

Sand, G., 242. 

Santayana, G., 346. 

Savary, 12. 

Sealiger, 325. 

Scherer, 73, 75, 131, 189-217, 218, 230, 
249, 272, 317. 

Schiller, 5, 20, 21. 

Schlegel, A. W., 12, 16, 20, 22, 81, 172. 

Schopenhauer, 310, 311, 331, 333. 

Scott, 81, 82. 

Seailles, 283. 

S<*che\ L., 108 n. 

Senancour, 199. 

Seneca, 57. 

Shakespeare, 23, 75, 80, 162, 163, 180, 
183, 184, 185,212, 221, 222, 232, 248, 
273. 

Shaw, Bernard, 221. 

Shelley, 302. 

Siger of Brabant, 304. 

Simon, 172. 

Singlin, 148. 



INDEX OF NAMES 



427 



Sismondi, 20, 81, 172. 

Socrates, 114, 345, 346, 358, 382, 383, 

386, 387. 
Solomon, 120. 

Sophocles, 23, 142, 164, 344. 
Southey, 338 n. 
Spenser, 35. 
Spinoza, 115 n., 120. 
Stael, Mme. de, 1-32, 45, 50, 58, 67, 69, 

80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 94, 96, 247, 355, 

356. 
Stendhal, 1,223,232. 
Suard, 12, 13. 
Swift, 47. 

Tacitus 13, 57. 

Tailhad* Laurent, 322. 

Taine, x, 32, 92, 131, 137, 140, 147, 151, 
163, 180, 181, 183, 200, 217, 218- 
256, 277, 299, 300, 302, 306, 325, 333, 
334, 341, 342, 343, 344, 363, 371, 375. 

Tallemant, 179. 

Talleyrand, 9 n., 12, 127. 

Tasso, 23, 24, 74, 312. 

Tennyson, 164, 199, 281, 339, 342. 

Tertullian, 287 n 

Texte, 32 n. 

Thackeray, 159, 170, 171, 177. 



Thierry, Augustin, 77, 78, 295 n. 
Titian, 164. 
Tolstoy, 23, 353, 375. 
Tracy, 102. 

Vacherot, 226, 227. 

Varius, 351. 

Verlaine, 44, 314. 

Vernet, Horace, 156, 177. 

VeVon, Dr., 158. 

Vigny, Alfred de, 136, 172, 305. 

Villemain, 82, 85-87, 95, 96, 107, 
121 n. 

Vinet, Alexandre, 102, 104, 190. 

Virgil, 45, 57, 68, 78, 351. 

Vogue", de, 299, 302, 330. 

Voltaire, 14, 41, 62, 66, 67, 68, 85, 86, 
93, 97, 115 n., 136, 159, 172, 179, 191, 
256, 268, 269, 322, 348, 375. 

Weiss, 206. 

Whitman, Walt, 329. 

Wieland, 19. 

Wilson, Bishop, 287. 

Wordsworth, 118, 172, 233, 285, 357. 

Zola, 141, 206, 207, 212, 239, 305, 306, 
307, 309, 314, 319, 320, 333, 376. 



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